Serenity: Leaves on the Wind
Story by Zack Whedon; pencils by Georges Jeanty
Dark Horse; GCD; Wikia; Wikipedia
Caution: spoilers.
A 6 issue miniseries (from 2014), which takes place about eight or nine months after the movie Serenity. It's also set sometime after the one-shot comic book Float Out, so you shouldn't read this story until having seen the movie and read that comic. In the movie, the pilot of Serenity, Hoban 'Wash' Washburne, was killed. And in "Float Out," we learned that his wife, Zoe, was pregnant with Wash's baby. Well, in this comic, she gives birth to a girl, whom she names Emma. That's actually a fairly minor aspect of the story, except that it sets up Zoe's temporary separation from her friends. Serenity's crew had been hiding out from the Alliance, ever since they'd broadcast proof of one of the government's crimes (in the movie). There's now a great deal of debate in the media, and as you'd expect, some people very vocally disbelieve the evidence, and consider the Serenity crew to be terrorists. In spite of such claims, many citizens believe the truth, and a group called the New Resistance has organized to oppose the Alliance. They want to find Malcolm Reynolds, and make him their leader. So some of the rebels, led by a woman named Bea, hire Jayne Cobb to help find Mal. (Jayne had left Serenity sometime after the movie, since he didn't want to go into hiding with Mal and the others.) Meanwhile, there are complications after Zoe gives birth, so Mal takes Serenity to a hospital to get her proper treatment, even knowing the authorities will be alerted to their presence as soon as they do. So they drop her off, and then leave, promising to return as soon as they can. After Zoe recovers enough to travel, the Alliance sends her to a desolate prison world, where she must fend for herself against the other prisoners, who are mostly rather violent. (Naturally, she's pretty damn good at fending for herself, while she waits with absolute confidence that her friends will somehow find out where she is, and come for her.)
Meanwhile, the Alliance sends Jubal Early, a bounty hunter first seen in an episode of the TV series Firefly, to find Serenity and her crew. And um... Mal and his friends plan their rescue of Zoe, but River comes to realize there are other girls like herself who have been experimented on by the Alliance, and she wants to rescue them. And potentially use them to help rescue Zoe. So, um... they go to the secret medical facility where the experiments were done, and receive help from both the Operative who had been their enemy in the movie, and from the Resistance. But it turns out that since River herself had been rescued from the facility before the doctors had completed their work, she was incomplete, and the other girls are not. Which means the people our heroes came to rescue are the greatest danger. But they do manage to capture one of the girls, along with an Alliance commander who knows where Zoe is. And they do finally rescue Zoe, who is now reunited with her friends and her baby. And Simon manages to "fix" the girl, whose name is Iris, and who now wants revenge against the Alliance for what they'd done to her. And, um... meanwhile, the Alliance still wants to find and capture River, Mal, and probably the rest of the crew. And there's an unnamed woman who appears to be high-ranking in the Alliance... I don't remember if we'd seen her before this story, and I don't know what her position actually is, but something is revealed about her in the end, which didn't surprise me at all. But it's still a cool twist, which I'd like to learn a lot more about... both about this woman, and about... the true purpose behind the experiments on all the girls, and... I dunno, it just seems like the Alliance might want to recover River for reasons that are... not precisely what we've been led to believe all along. It could be much more intriguing and complicated than we ever imagined. So, I look forward to more comics, someday.
Oh, and the compilation of this miniseries also includes a bonus story, It's Never Easy.