This webcomic chronicles the tragic cancellation of a brilliant show called Firefly Hiatus by evil studio execs, and the journey of a tribe of fans (and one hapless Hiatus virgin) who live in an apartment papered with Serenity posters.  Now, it takes something to make me laugh out loud, especially when sitting alone staring at my computer screen, but this baby had me in stitches more than a few times.

So if you’ve ever dreamed of a webcomic where characters say gorram when they swear, network whiteboards contain notes to cancel all Tim Minear shows immediately, and your favorite show is replaced by Debutante Detectives, head on over to Save Hiatus and settle in for a bit.  You’ll like it there.

If your visit to Save Hiatus leaves you hungering for webcomics, Serenity Tales has a selection you might want to check out while you wait for the next Hiatus update.

First order of business will be to make sure my shop is working properly again and add some of the shiny new stuff I’ve been working on.  Then comes the rest of the news…comics (I have one of the limited variant covers of Better Days #1….and I’ll be sharing pics!), new patches, and news on Nathan Fillion’s latest projects.  Oh, and if you’ve been following my fanfics, I have two new chapters of The Losing Side that I’ll be posting shortly and another short Stargate Atlantis fic.

The book can be downloaded at Brust’s website here: http://dreamcafe.com/firefly.html

I also have it available to download from my own server as a sort of insurance should that link die; you can download it by clicking here.

My Own Kind of Freedom is released under a Creative Commons license; for specific details visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Now, they have a Serenity latte cup and a mug with a vanishing ship up for pre-order.  The botched mugs are listed as out of stock.  Here come the questions - were the shot glasses cancelled because of the sheer awfulness of the mugs?  Are the newly announced products going to actually be released, and if so, are they going to be any good?  Or, WTF?

I’m eying these with caution.  The new designs actually look cool, but…..will they be?  And will they actually be shipped?

Like the Serenity ornament, it arrives packaged in a beautifully designed box and protected in fitted styrofoam.  It comes with a stand just like the one on the Serenity ornament, which holds it up and allows it to “fly” realistically at various angles.  There is a tiny gold screw in the top with a string to hang it from should you choose to use it as an ornament, but it can be easily removed for display on the stand.

The ship is cute and pretty nicely detailed, and of course a fun addition to the merchandise of the ‘verse.  It’s not to scale with the Serenity ornament (if it were, it’d be about a half inch long!), so you may want to display it in a different location to avoid a certain oddness.

There are a few things that irritate me about this, though.  The ship is a simpler craft than Serenity, so logically it’s going to have less detailing, and be less inherently impressive than Serenity.  This leads to a certain crudeness of appearance when you compare the two.   

What really confounds me is the fact that for a simpler and less detailed model, the price is higher!  You’ll be expected to fork over $30.00 for Inara’s shuttle, and just $20.00 for the Serenity ornament.    Not so much with the making sense, or value.   The upcoming reaver ship, which looks no more impressive than the shuttle, is retailing at $40.00, with pre-orders at $32.00!  Looks to me as though Dark Horse is looking to see just how much they can gouge the wallets of browncoats, and I’m not ecstatic….in fact I’m going to pass on the reaver ship.

So….you may want to pick this up.  It’s a fun addition to your collection, and limited to an edition of 5,000 so it won’t be around forever.  But unlike the Serenity ship ornament, this one isn’t making my “top picks” list.   I’ll take photos and get them on here as soon as I can.

Rating:  Worth The Cashy Money

Approximate Price: $27-30.00

Available From: www.tfaw.com

I received it in the mail from TFAW (paid almost as much for shipping as I did the mug!) and pulled it eagerly out of the box.  Even if the design was incredibly basic, I expected high quality because that’s what Dark Horse has typically delivered in their Serenity products.

Um.  Not.  This mug is really, really underwhelming.  The print quality (for lack of a better term) of the logo is awful.  Far from being crisp and bright, it has underdeveloped colors, an almost matte finish, and the printing is muddy - the elements of the logo almost run together.  The words Serenity are printed in grey, not white.

I’m not sure if printing it this way was a stylistic choice or just an awful printing job, but either way the result is the same….it looks like an awful printing job.  The mug was packaged in bubble wrap, no cool box for added value or anything.  Not that I demand a box, but it would have been a nice touch especially given the sheer badness of the actual product. Can’t recommend this to much of anyone.

Rating:  Reaver Food

Approximate Price: $8.99

Available From: www.tfaw.com

So, when I opened my copy, I wasn’t expecting much, but - it’s beautiful.  It really is.  This is the format the comics belong in; they are sized like the original comics (which were shrunk down for the trade paperback version) and all three issues are readable straight through to make for a nice little graphic novel.

The new cover art is lovely, and there has been some really pretty design work done on the inside pages.  Nathan Fillion’s introduction and may of the other opening pages have a lovely full-color background that is just plain pretty to look at.  The entire project is treated with respect and care. 

Given that, I don’t really understand why one of the comic book covers was cut from the book and the covers of two of the books were combined.  It seems like a sloppy touch in a book that is fundamentally not sloppy at all.  The other cheap shortcut taken was the boasted-about extra material, which turns out to only be the Joss Whedon-penned background on the ‘verse which has already been published in the excellent Serenity Visual Companion.  If you don’t already have the visual companion, this addition to Those Left Behind is a nice touch….but for the hard-core fans buying this book it’s a little pointless.  The added art is mainly concept sketches for the movie….nothing to write home about and rather irrelevant to a collection of comics.

Despite the downfalls, I remain enthusiastic about this book, though.  It is simply too nicely done to dislike.  The new art and the new pages are a thing of beauty, and I love the new cover art and the fact that the comic pages themselves are larger.  I love the fact that it’s a nice quality hardcover as opposed to a little paperback.

If you don’t have Those Left Behind and are choosing between the hardcover and softcover versions, the hardcover wins hands down unless you have a severely limited budget.  If you don’t have the comics in any form, I would highly recommend picking up this hardcover - it does them true justice.

As for the actual comics themselves, I remain lukewarm.  It’s obviously a thrill that our beloved franchise garnered a comic series, and that through it we received a Serenity story that would not otherwise exist.  But the comics fail to capture what it was I loved about Firefly and Serenity.  Reading the comics makes it excruciatingly plain how much the charisma and ability of the actors had to do with the magic that was Firefly.  The dialog has a hint of the Firefly magic, but it’s like reading a script: far flatter than the experience of seeing it delivered to perfection on screen.  But we take what we can get, right?

Rating:  Serenityverse Top Pick

Approximate Price: $14.00 - list price $19.59

Available From: www.amazon.com

When Razor’s Edge first posted photographs of their prototype of the Mal bust, I was not impressed.  While I’d seen worse (let’s face it, the Mal action figures and the Diamond Select character statues are just plain awful), this still failed to impress me, and at $50.00 it was certainly not added to my list of things to buy.

That changed when I saw the far more appealing final product photos, and after some pondering, I bought one.  It didn’t look perfect, but it was close enough that this Mal fanatic just had to have one.  Interested?  Get yours soon - it’s limited and many have already been sold.

The good:

• This is the closest anyone has come to a realistic-looking Mal figure.  There are no glaring errors, and the resemblence is quite decent.  It blows away the action figures and PVC figure, and all the fan custom-made figures I’ve seen.
• For the Mal fan, this is the best figure available, hands-down….and it may forever be.  On that basis, it’s hard to resist.
• The pose is quintessential Mal, with the gun and the determined look and all.
• The detailing is great, even the clothes and the gun are spot-on.  The hair is worth an honorable mention - they got the Mal hair right
• It’s half the price of the Diamond Select statues of River, Inara, and Zoe, and a far better likeness than anything they seem prone to crank out.  If you want a higher-end, realistic Mal figure, you’d best pounce on this one, because I don’t see a better option on the horizon.
• The gun is shiny - they did a really good and accurate job on the detailing.
• This was produced with care by fans, and I’m always willing to give extra leeway to such things.

The bad:

• For all that it’s better than previous attempts, the face just doesn’t capture the essence of Mal.  It’s not absurdly far off like the action figures, but without the costume and the gun I wouldn’t recognize it as a likeness of Mal.  That said, it’s the best likeness that’s ever been made, and quite possibly the best we’ll ever get.  The decision of whether it’s worth the money is an individual one.
• One particular downfall is the eyes - they are poorly painted and simply don’t have that determined spark that our captain’s do.  The paint is matte, which is perhaps a mistake.  Something glossy might make them look more like eyes, and specifically more like Mal’s.
• The pose is a bit odd.  Aiming the gun is good - quintessential Mal.  But I can’t recall Mal ever shooting with one hand held behind his back.  It certainly isn’t a trademark pose and makes him look more like a gentleman dueler than a rough-and-tumble outlaw.
• Bust = creepy.  I love my captain, and I prefer him with his legs attached, thank you very much!  This is where my non-collector-ness shows through; busts are common, but it’s a new concept to me and I’m having a hard time seeing Mal’s dismembered torso sprouting out of the top of my DVD player.
• It’s really expensive for what you get.  It seems poised in an odd price range between the awful $100.00 Diamond Select statues and the cheap and equally awful action figures, but I can’t get over the fact that this is, essentially, half an action figure selling for fifty dollars.  On the flip side, this is a limited edition of 1,000 and represents a lot of hard work, so I can see where they need to get their money out of it.  I guess it would make more sense to me to see this in the $25 range of the Dark Horse Serenity ornament and be an unlimited run.  At that price point it would be an excellent value, and more fans would have a chance to partake.

Rating:  Collector Bait

Approximate Price: $50.00 retail ($60.00 shipped), future ebay pricing unknown.

Available From: Razor’s Edge Collectibles

I’ve tried to show the bust from a variety of angles in my photographs here; these aren’t the best pictures I’ve ever taken but they do a fair job.  If you do an internet search for reviews of this bust, you should be able to find quite a few additional photographs.  My color tones aren’t spot-on here; the skin is a little less yellow, and the coat is a slightly truer brown than the photos reflect.  The face is the make-or-break feature of this, so I’ve photographed it from a number of angles.  I’ll go so far as to say this is the best Serenity action figure/statue made to date; unfortunately, the bar has been set so low by previous products that my praise has a hollow ring to it.

Still…..he has a handsome mug

• Joss will be co-authoring a comic titled A Shepherd’s Tale
• Book found God in a bowl of soup
• A part of Book (not the hair!) is artificial
• Book is best known for his biggest failure
• He took the name Derrial from the man he killed

Let the speculation begin!

I’m quite happy with the cover art; while comic-bookish (and, well, it would be, wouldn’t it!), it does a much better job capturing the characters than the Those Left Behind covers did.  The sparkle of Mal’s eyes, Zoe’s strong warmth, Wash’s good-natured cheer all shine through and remind me of how much I love the characters.  Here’s hoping that feeling carries through in the actual comic book art; I had a hard time relating the characters in Those Left Behind to their screen personas.  Granted, Mal looks like he just finished a three-year booze-fest, but it’s still an improvement over past efforts.  Doesn’t say much for the past efforts, I know.  But I still like it.

Rating:  Serenityverse Top Pick

Approximate Price: $2.99

Available From: www.TFAW.com