Comics Picks of The Week 29.01.2014

Not as busy a week as the last but fairly busy nonetheless. The new creative teams on various ongoing titles continue to go strong, particularly Justice League Dark and Witchblade while some of the newer titles like Black Science continue to be exception, so that’s one thing that I really liked about this past week. January in particular has been a really excellent month of comics what with Marvel’s full-on All-New Marvel NOW! launch and some really good issues for DC’s Forever Evil event.

Just one graphic novel again this week, the Lee/Buscema magnificence that is Silver Surfer: Judgement. I was meaning to read at least one more, but time wasn’t on my side and I missed out. Hopefully the new month gets off to a good start.

Anyway, here’s another edition of this new feature. Full reading list, as always, is available here and all my comics reviews are available here.

Serenity: Leaves On A Wind #1 (Comics Review)

A few years there was this out-and-out space opera science fiction show called Firefly. It didn’t last long, only like half a season or something, but in the years since its untimely and abrupt cancellation, it has become one of the great cult classic television shows. Fan reaction to the show was so severe that Joss Whedon eventually came back to do a movie, Serenity, to tie off some of the loose ends that were left open. I saw all of it in my college years, and I remember that it was a really good show and movie. I certainly enjoyed both. So when Dark Horse announced last year that they were going to continue the story in a comics series, I was very ecstatic.

Written by Joss Whedon’s brother Zack Whedon, and drawn by Georges Jeanty, this issue is everything I could ask for, story-wise. It carries on from where Serenity left off and it lays some really good groundwork for what happened afterwards, since in the timeline, eight months have now passed since the truth about the Reavers was exposed in the movie. Art-wise though, I have my reservations, because most of the characters look nothing like how they are on the show/movie. I mean, I realize that there would be differences, but the differences here are on the order where I can’t even recognize them!

Firefly Rewatch Eps 1-2 (TV Show Review)

Firefly is one of those TV shows that became a cult classic after it was prematurely taken off air. It struggled with ratings and viewership while it was on air and when it was cancelled, fans began to come out of the woodwork in support of it. Its an interesting phenomenon. Particularly since fan response eventually got Joss Whedon to make a movie that closed off some of the plots that had been carried on the series from episode to episode.

I first saw the show some seven or so years ago, and I was pretty impressed with it. It did quite a few things that I didn’t expect of it, and it was pretty unique in the end, with some really great characters and plots. Not to mention some of the mysteries that the show created. It was great fun and just out of some strong nostalgia, I decided to watch it again, last week. I also wanted to see how the show would hold from those early days, and I must say that it holds up remarably well.