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Collection published: 2018 Contents originally published: 2017-18 Read: July 2021 |
Illustrated by Huang Danlan
I have read an Expanse story every eighty-one days since February 2018. At the time I plotted out this plan, only the first seven novels were out, but projections were that by the time I hit book nine in August 2021, all of them would be. Book eight was ready in time, but the final novella and final novel both ran afoul of substantial delays; up until now, Expanse novels have averaged thirteen months apart, but the gap between books eight and nine is thirty-two months! So to fill the spot that I would have read the eighth ebook short, I decided to read The Expanse: Origins, a comic book prequel from Boom that was co-plotted by James S.A. Corey, even though they left the actual writing to someone else.
Origins consists of five stories, one for each of the Rocinante characters plus Detective Miller, and is actually a prequel to the television program, though I think that in the case of every story except the Alex one, there's nothing that would prevent them from fitting into the book universe, too. The art is fine; Huang Danlan has a style that does a decent job of capturing the actors from the tv program, but it also didn't pull me in. You've seen worse art on tv tie-in comics, but you've probably seen better too.
The stories vary in quality. The only one I didn't care for was the Amos one, which was just told in this really weird, experimental format that didn't ring true for the character of Amos. The conceit that he was somehow reliving his life through the lens of a game show just went on and on and on, and didn't reveal much about him. To be fair, though, pretty much everything you could want to know about Amos was already covered in the novella The Churn.
Most of the others were fine. Holden's tells the story of how he was discharged from the Earth military; this I thought was less interesting than what I had imagined from the hints in the show. Miller's is about a case he was on shortly before the events of the show; I kind of wanted to see him as more of a screw-up than this story indicated. (He does fail, but it's not his fault.) What he does in Leviathan Wakes should be a last chance at redemption. The Naomi one was pretty neat; again, Naomi's "origin" was already pretty well covered in books, so this focuses on how she became friends with Amos, and it is nice to see.
In the books, Alex is a divorcee without kids. In the show, though, he has a wife and kid back on Mars that he never goes back to. (Though, between book six and seven, Alex remarries, has a kid, and gets divorced, seemingly another example of Corey synchronizing the book characters with the show ones.) In here, we learn why he would be willing to go off into space and basically never go back home and see his family again. Some art issues aside (I found two female characters difficult to distinguish), it's an effective and depressing piece of backstory that I found helpful for deepening my understanding of show Alex.
So I don't know that I would pay the $15 retail for this, but if you can get it off Hoopla like I did, it's worth the hour-ish it will take you to read it.
I read an Expanse story every eighty-ish days. Next up in sequence: The Expanse
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