Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Greg Pak
Creator: Joss Whedon
Artists: Dan McDaid
Released: April 30^th, 2019
Received: Own

Are you a fan of Firefly and Serenity? Did you wish that the series had lasted more than one season (and a movie)? Well, I have some good news for you. The series did continue on, just in graphic novel form.

Firefly: The Unification War Vol. 1 is the first in the latest graphic novel series for a beloved series. Though there’s plenty of backlog out there to read as well, mind you. While the original series was created by Joss Whedon, this graphic novel series is written by Greg Pak, and illustrated by Dan McDaid.

Mal and Zoe fought in a brutal war, long before the events of Firefly. Now, it’s time to finally learn a bit more about what they went through. The good, and all of the bad. This is the truth of the Unification War.

Firefly: The Unification War Vol. 1 reads exactly like an episode of Firefly, and I mean that in the best way possible. You can practically picture how they would have told this story, if they were able to, on the small screen.

The story feels real, in the same way that the characters that we’ve come to love do. Granted, it really does help that it is still so easy to picture the actors bringing all of them to life – not that I’m complaining.

I adore that we finally got some answers about what went down during the Unification War. Yes, a lot of it had been hinted at, but much of it had been left unsaid. I’m sure that if there had been more than one season, a story like this would have eventually been told.

Greg Pak did a great job of getting into the characters and their mindsets for this volume. While McDaid really did manage to make them look like their TV versions – with a few twists to make the adaptation work.

I should mention that this series also goes forward a bit in time, set somewhere between the end of the show, and the beginning of the movie (I believe). So they’re working with a pretty tight point in time. Some leeway should be granted because of that, as far as I’m concerned.

Personally, I hope that someday they’ll continue on from where Serenity left off, even if that is a painful point to think about (given all of the permanent events that occurred within the movie). Still, I’ll take it, just to learn what would happen next.