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?