Comics

Comic Review – Serenity: No Power In The Verse #2

By Alyssa Vaughn • 7 months ago

Nov
2016

Much like the fans of Arrested Development who disavow the Netflix-produced episodes from their hearts and headcanons, I approach every Serenity comic equally willing to love and hate the new additions to the Verse. Whedon’s involvement merits him an “executive producer” credit on the front cover, just like the ongoing Buffy titles, so it’s not surprising that the storylines stack nicely with the show and movie canon, and obviously with the previous Serenity comics.

At the risk of sounding like a whiny basement dweller… it’s just not the same.

With No Power in the Verse, writer Chris Roberson does a decent job of capturing the voices of the Serenity crew, though the folksy dialects peppered with Chinese swears and endearments don’t flow as easily through paper as they did from mouths of the actors. But, to be fair, we’ve all seen the blooper reels and every one of those actors had multiple takes to get those lines right. The story is a fairly logical progression based on previous in-comic events, and isn’t too stale in so much as the conflict between the Alliance and their downtrodden citizenry is far from resolved, and galaxies full of people interacting means that there will always be a new caper to pick up. However, No Power in the Verse is a little too much same song, different… planet.

Art team Georges Jeanty (pencils), Karl Story (inks), Wes Dzioba (colors), and Michael Heisler (letters) create some beautiful illustrations for this issue. However, the character movements are stiff, even in fight scenes, and the expressions try too hard to look nice that they end up looking blank, whether the characters are excited, angry, or apprehensive. This somehow backfires even for a stoic character like River, who manages to look like she’s constantly in the process of rolling her eyes at whoever’s speaking.

I feel like I would enjoy this title more if it wasn’t Firefly, or if it didn’t focus on the crew of the Serenity. Maybe the things I don’t enjoy wouldn’t take me out of the story so much if I wasn’t looking really hard for the comic to be as enjoyable to me as the show. This definitely hasn’t been a problem for all Serenity comic titles; I loved Better Days and Those Left Behind. I’m hopeful that future issues will be a bit more engaging, and bring back a little of the spark that made me love the Verse at the beginning.