Let me put it this way--if you don't care about continuity errors, coherency, or actual ANSWERS to who Shepard Book was...this is fine. Too much of what is in the book does not mesh with what we learned in the series (or movie). Much as how the opening of Serenity (the movie) completely ret'conned how River got out of the Institute, this book tried to give us an alternative to how Book became Book. Sadly it just didn't make sense. ( )

This was pretty OK. The art was a bit primitive and the only Firefly character in it for more than a page or two (obviously) was Book, but it worked. The interesting convention of starting with the end of Book's life and working backward was effective. Telling the same story forward, it would be more difficult for the reader to identify with the character, because we mostly know him from his latter days. I'm glad his story has been told, however briefly (and still somewhat cryptically). ( )

This is a comic that is purely aimed at those of us who loved Firefly and Serenity and always wanted to know what Shepherd Book's back story was.   It used to be available on Kindle, which i managed to get, but for some reason only the expensive hard back is now available.

While this comic goes through Book's earlier life, it does so in such a way that is just totally messy and disjointed.   I can't understand how anyone could sit down and think that this was a good way to tell Book's story.   It starts at the end, where Book gets killed on Haven, and then keeps jumping back in time a few years at a time, but each jump is so harsh and disjointed it just leaves you having to go back over things several times to try and make some sense out of it.

To be fair, i would normally put a book this bad on "The Bookshelf of Infamy", but as a total Firefly and Serenity fan looking at the only thing that tells of Shepherd Book's past, albeit in a really badly presented way, i'm willing to spare it that utter shame and give it a hairline pass with 2 stars -- but that's an only just scraped into the bottom of 2 stars.

The annoying thing is that the Whedon's obviously know how popular Shepherd Book was and how much everyone wanted to know more about his past.   Shepherd Book fully deserved a full length novel.   Even if the Whedon's couldn't be bothered to write it themselves, they could at least have just dumped all their notes onto a really good writer and let them have at it.

Shepherd Book deserved better!!! ( )

It's definitely not what I expected, but it was a nice read. I love Samnee so I'm pretty biased but as usual this was a beautiful piece of work. The writing was very good. You have to read it at least twice to get everything because of the backwards storytelling. But overall I enjoyed it, and it's worth the reread, and more.

If you like "Baccano", you would like this. If you like this, think about checking out "Baccano". The storytelling is similar. ( )

Never one of my favorite characters in Firefly, but I absolutely loved this! The unusual narrative style (reverse chronology tied together by phrases) and fascinating character development made it nearly perfect. ( )