It’s Free Comic Book Day, and I finally got around to reading the Serenity graphic novel Those Left Behind, and I’m so glad I did. It’s basically a missing episode of Firefly that bridges the ending of the TV series and the start of the movie. And the interior illustrations are as gorgeous as the cover -- I’ve often felt gypped when comics have beautiful painted covers and then far simpler and less interesting illustrations inside. But that’s not the case here.
The graphic novel has a fantastic introduction, by Nathan Fillion, who played Serenity’s captain, Mal Reynolds. We already knew Fillion is a major geek, and his essay, a lovely remembrance of growing up with comics, is a little masterpiece of geeky literature. I couldn’t find it online anywhere, but here’s how it starts:
When I was very young, before I could read, I remember being interested in comic books. Our bedtime was not negotiable, but we could delay “lights out” for another half hour if we read anything. I mostly looked at the pictures; I could make out “a” and “the,” and then simply tried to piece together a story. I could tell that Jughead liked to eat, Archie was broke, Betty was nice, and Veronica was mean. There are only so many times you can read the same ones, though, so my dad would take my brother and me to Whyte Avenue. Not too far down from Uncle Albert’s Pancake House (burned down since then) was the Wee Book Inn, a store that had an odora bit like someone’s grandmother’s house. Not mine, but someone’s. I remember the dirty orange carpet, frayed and ragged. The wooden shelves were tall and packed with worn covers of books read many times over. Pages were yellowed and paperbacks has arched spines like old sway-backed horses. It was an old-folks’ home for secondhand books, with that smell of old newsprint and slightly musty wood. There were stacks of magazines with fat, contented cats sleeping on them that you could pet without fear of being scratched. If ever there was a mystical “Ye Olde Magic Shoppe” in my life, this was it. It was a trading post for old books, and more importantly, comics. My dad would have us bring all thge comics we could bear to part with, and we would watch as the clerk would shuffle through them, calculating their value. I felt as though I was in the days of the Klondike, come down from my claim in the hills and waiting for the assayer to separate the fool’s gold from the real thing. His appraisal would determine how many secondhand comics we could walk away with. Always fewer than what we came in with, but my Pops would pull out his wallet, careful to make sure we never left with a smaller stack. Comics were our treasure, our booty, and we would rush up to our rooms and file them away carefully on our very own spinning comic rack.
And there’s a lot more. I’d recommend Serenity: Those Left Behind for Fillion’s essay alone, but fortunately, I don’t have to. The whole thing is worth a read. Check it out.
