Dark Horse Comics: Serenity

If you're a science fiction fan and you haven't seen the Firefly series, grab them up. (I blogged a very tiny bit about Firefly previously.) Buy 'em from Amazon, check them out from your library. Firefly's even available from Netflix if you're a member. (I'm not.) In advance of the upcoming movie Serenity, Dark Horse comics is releasing a set of three comic books supposedly meant to bridge the gap between events in the Firefly series and the movie. Dark Horse did something seriously cool and had nine different artists do a cover. Each issue will have three different releases. You can check out all the artwork here. My personal favorite is Joe Quesada's cover of Zoe. Man, what a great use of shadows and light! I especially like the way Zoe's left eye is a splashy point of light in the middle of a dark zone. Just a killer cover! The worst one is a tie between this awful rendition of Inara and this shallow one of Simon. Jones completely missed the grace that Morena Baccarin brought to Inara, and her hands look like they're something grafted on from a strangler. Yu's cover of Simon is just stupid. Why a gun? Simon was always a great doctor who was completely lost when he had a firearm in hand, a grand total of two times in the entire series if I'm the Firefly geek I think I am. Furthermore, he was always deeply conflicted about violence. Couldn't Yu have thought of something more complex? Maybe I'm too hard on Yu -- it could be that somewhere along the line in the comics Simon morphs from the great doctor into a brutally efficient, cold-hearted killer. Boy, would that suck. OK, so I'm overly geeked out about this whole Serenity thing, but I'm looking forward to this much, much more than Revenge of the Sith. UPDATE: If your system's got the horsepower, check out the high-definition 138MB trailer. Killer stuff, although it's amazing that the Universal folks have the brass ones to include digital licensing in the file. What, like anyone's going to sell a damned trailer?