Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale

   This is a hard back graphic novel which gives the back story of Derrial Book, one of the characters in Firefly and Serenity. The production values are good and the story does, as promised, reveal Book's history. The art is not inspired; I've seen better, but I've also seen worse.
   That's the good part. Now on to the bad parts.
   It's thin. It feels to me as if Joss Whedon handed over some sketchy notes and refused to do anything further, and Zack Whedon didn't dare to add anything beyond those notes. It's not the sort of thing where you'd go back and savor the story and find new aspects to it that you like.
   It was written backwards. You start with the last few minutes of Book's life and then have successive flashbacks, going further and further back in time, with the last sequence being when he is about ten years old. It's a confusing format, and of course you can't properly interpret the later part of his life when you don't know about the earlier part. I wonder whether it was written that way because it would be even more thin if it were straightforward; at least this way you can stay bewildered for a bit and think about it for forty seconds after you finish reading it.
   And the conversion scene is unconvincing. Whedon is an atheist and Ron Glass, the actor who played Book, is a Buddhist. In watching the series, I never got the feeling that either of them understood Christianity at all, and the "how Book found God in a bowl of soup" part of this tale does nothing to remedy that. I might go along with "Book realized there are things bigger than himself" but there was no reason given for why he would have become a Christian layman, much less a pastor.
   I'd like to support the Firefly franchise but I can't recommend spending money on this. If you really need to know Book's back story, borrow a copy. Or just ask for the five-sentence summary instead of reading the whole thing--you won't be missing much.