Favorites - 15 Favorite Black Characters in Sci-Fi

The science fiction genre has given us a crapton of characters to follow and root for. When it comes Black folk, it gets a little tough. You may see one or even two of us running around or being a side piece somewhere. Even when you see one of us playing a character, they’re sometimes playing an alien. Just guess why you won’t see someone like Guinan, Worf, and Tuvok from Star Trek or Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy. I could make a case for Teal’C from Stargate: SG-1 since he is technically human, but I’ll leave him off this one. It gives me a chance to look for other characters outside of these big sci-fi franchises.

So, here are my favorite black characters in the genre. One limitation I gave myself was that I wouldn’t include any superheroes on this list, so no Storm or John Stewart. I actually made a list similar to this years ago, and I wanted to look in other places where there are some cool characters. I might break that rule for a couple, but I’ll only go so far. As usual, it’s a bit of a random list, but I’ll put my favorites up top. You only can guess who’ll be first.

Trade Tales! - Serenity: A Shepard's Tale

Next up for the month is a return to the Firefly franchise. Outside of the TV show and movie, I haven’t ingested other Firefly material. I think part of it just has to do with the fact that I got other stuff to do. It is out there if you look. There are novels, Dark Horse Comics has had the license to do stories with most of Joss Whedon’s properties and Firefly is one of them. Whedon’s even been involved with a few. I ended up coming across this somewhere and something about it really struck my fancy: Shepard Book.

Derrial Book (played by the late Ron Glass) was the Serenity’s holy man. He’s a Shepard which is a priest or pastor in the Firefly universe. While he was a man of God, he seemed to do well with the pretty shady crew of the Serenity. Even he had some shades himself especially if you remember his little moment with “kneecaps.” We never found out more since the show got cancelled. When he was brought back for a bit in the movie, he met an unfortunate end. Since he was pretty popular, the Whedons (Joss and Zack) decided to do a graphic novel surrounding his origins.

Serenity: A Shepard’s Tale was released in 2010. Joss provided the plot while Zack handled the story and dialogue. Chris Samnee, who I know from his run on Daredevil, handled the artwork. The colors were done by Dave Stewart. The letterer was Michael Haesler. Finally, the awesome cover art was done by Steve Morris. So, what did this Shepard get up to in his youth?

Favorites –16 TV Shows That Ended Too Soon

With everything that’s going on these days, we may have something pretty good to look forward too: another season of Young Justice. This was one show that I felt got cut down too soon. It ended with a crapload of stuff left to talk about. When you have the Lord of Apokalips show up in the last minute of your show, you better do something with it! I hate it when shows get cut off too soon. It definitely sucks when they’re just one season in. Even when it’s lasted for a few years, something happens and it’s gone like a fart in the wind or something.

So, here are a few shows that went away too soon. If you notice some popular underrated shows missing, that’s because I can only do so much. Besides, Pushing Daisies didn’t sound like my thing. There were a couple of shows that went away before I could get invested in them like Almost Human and a couple of others. Whether they were animated or live-action, there have been ones that I was pretty sad to see go. The list isn’t in complete order, but the first few are ones that I still feel jaded on.

TV/Movie Talk - Firefly and Serenity

Well, it’s finally time to show some occasional fondness for the man known as Joss Whedon. He’s known for things like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and some indie movie called The Avengers. Then there’s this not-well-known property, Firefly. For those who don’t know, Firefly is the one show of Whedon’s that has kind of has a cult following. Whedon took the final frontier of space and literally made a western of it. Unfortunately (to its fans), it was one show that didn’t receive more accolades than it could have gotten. I think I may be to blame as well since I missed out on this entirely.

The show debuted on FOX September 20^th, 2002, my birthday. It then ended a few episodes later in December 2002. That has got to be one kick in the face. I missed out on this show since it aired on Friday nights. While it was on, I was in a marching uniform playing quads and trying to look good while doing it. I don’t think I ever saw an episode until it aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. I think it’s possible that I didn’t watch an episode until I found the DVD set at the library in 2011. Now, I did see Serenity, the blockbuster continuation, before I saw an episode of the series. It was playing on MTSU’s movie channel back in 2005 and I tuned to see it without knowing anything about it.

This is one show I’ve wanted to revisit for some time. For the past couple of weeks, I went on Netflix and more or less watched the whole thing. There are only 14 episodes, so it wasn’t a hassle. I watched Serenity afterwards. I actually bought this when our local Movie Gallery was going out of business. The show and movie take place about 500 years in the future. Earth was used up, so humanity took to the stars in order to live. They found worlds and terraformed them to make them habitable. A civil war broke out between the rich and poor planets with the rich (the Alliance) winning. We follow the crew of the Serenity a few years after the war ended. The crew, led by Malcolm Reynolds, does jobs that are sometimes not so law-abiding. Things begin to change when they let some new passengers on board.