Saturday, February 14, 2015

Serenity: Better Days and Other Stories

Title: Serenity: Better Days and Other Stories
Author: Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews. Will Conrad
Series: Serenity, vol 2
Genre: Graphic Novel
Published: 2008
Rating: 7/10

Review: This volume contains four different stories. The first one is called Better Days and seems to be taking place between the end of the Firefly series and the beginning of Serenity movie. Wash and Inara are both on board of the ship for this story. The crew unexpectedly makes a large amount of money from a job. Then they fantasize about how they are going to spend the money.

There are some pretty funny moments there, for example, Jayne imagines himself a captain of a ship and refers to himself as Radiant Cobb. They go to a luxury planet to spend some of the money and of course trouble follows them there.

Overall, there were a few twists in the story, which I found a bit difficult to discern from the pictures. I had to go back and re-examine panels in detail to see what they were talking about. But the story itself was well put-together and the twists made it interesting.

I also enjoyed the full-page artwork in this novel. There are crew portraits spread out between different stories that have a lot of detail and look very well done.

The other three stories in this volume are much shorter. The Other Half focuses on River's increasing involvement with the crew and her use of psychic abilities. Downtime has the crew stuck in a snow storm and again sets up River as an important character. Finally Float Out takes place after the events in Serenity. Three Wash's friends buy a ship together and tell stories about Wash.

The three stories are somewhat disjointed and I liked Better Days best out of the four. Still, there are small reveals about the characters contained in every story, which makes them totally worthwhile.

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