Serenity: Those Left Behind by Brett Matthews
Firefly was an excellent television series. It was created by Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and was essentially a western in space – literally, not metaphorically. The captain of the ship Serenity, Mal Reynolds, actually wears braces, and in one episode the cargo bay is full of cows, no less. Firefly didn’t make an impact on television and was cancelled after one season, without the season being shown in its entirety. However, it made a big impact on DVD, so big that it spawned a big-budget movie: Serenity. Firefly’s great strength was the diverse characters of the ship’s crew – from a thief to a preacher. Essentially it’s a ship full of outlaws, runaways, or people trying to make a difference – well, one anyway. Their aim is to try and stay alive, making a dishonest living and steering clear of a corrupt galactic Federation. In theme, I was reminded very much of an old British series from the 1970s called Blake’s 7.
Watching Firefly was a romance that was sweet but all too short, and I was quickly left wanting more. Serenity filled that gap for a while. And now, some comics have arrived to keep the fans happy. Those Left Behind was a mixed experience. In terms of characters, the writer nailed it. So often the crew of Serenity said something that made me smile and think, “Yep. That’s exactly the sort of thing that X would say.” The artwork is also beautifully drawn. The let-down is the story itself. There’s just not enough going on. I don’t think there was a single uninteresting episode of the Firefly series, but this graphic novel reads just like filler material. In fact, it’s clear from the story that it’s set in the time between the series and the movie, and shows how the characters ended up where they were at the start of the movie. As for the content, it’s essentially a case of an old enemy of Mal’s coming after him; fisticuffs; the end. Aside from a sub-plot that descends into the same territory, that’s it.
A vaguely interesting average read and no more.

Strontium Dog was one of my favourite characters from the pages of the weekly British sci-fi comic 2000 A.D., which originated in the early 1980s and continues to flourish today. I read the comic erratically in my youth, so until now I’ve only been scratching the surface of the amount of Strontium Dog strips that have been published. In fact, you could say I’m still only scratching the surface, since this mammoth 330-page tome is merely one of four.
Another enjoyable volume in The Walking Dead saga, although not quite on par with the first one. For me, there was far too much dialogue. Some frames had speech bubbles that were overloaded, the characters constantly pausing to express their feelings about life in the wake of the apocalypse. I get that the author wants to tell a story with emotion as well as action, but there’s such a thing as overkill. And frankly, we’ve heard it all before, and more succinctly, in George Romero’s movies.
Little did we know that while Arnold Schwarzenegger was wreaking havoc in the first Terminator movie, there was another Terminator on the loose in another part of town. This Terminator is a huge hulking woman, and her mission is just like Arnie’s: seek and destroy everyone called Sarah Conner. And although she’s unwittingly tracking the wrong Sarah, the story is still pretty interesting.
This graphic novel (originally a four-issue comic) hails from the early 1990s. I’ve a feeling it was released prior to the Terminator 2: Judgment Day movie. It reads like an alternate sequel to the first movie, with notable differences. The comic, not having any advantage to featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator (since it would only be his likeness, and not him) takes the story in possibly a more logical direction. Instead of superior Terminator technology (i.e. the liquid-like remouldable Terminator) heading back through time, we have a whole team of basic Terminators, all of them different. The aim this time is not to track down Sarah Conner (or her son John, as in the movie), but to make sure that artificial intelligence technology gets into the hands of the scientists who would unwittingly bring about the end of the world. The Terminators do this by the most direct means possible: tracking down the main scientist and giving him the goods. The Terminators are opposed, not by one lone crusader, but by a team of humans who come back in time to stop them.
The artwork in this graphic novel was so beautiful that it called to me from the library shelf. I had never heard of the Rising Stars, mythology but it seems that each tale works in a standalone fashion. The two in this volume are concerned with two different characters. The common thread that unites the whole series is that each protagonist is a “Special.” Here’s what that means (from the back cover):
Zombies are very much in vogue these days, whether it’s computer games or movies, you don’t have far to go before coming across rotting flesh that gets up and walks. The Walking Dead is a graphic novel, and title has to be one of the least imaginative titles of any zombie product. But don’t let that fool you, because the blurb on the back is the biggest attention grabber I’ve ever seen on any zombie story. I quote:
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