New 'Firefly' Series Announced

It's time for Browncoats everywhere to take the skies once again. Boom! Studios has acquired the rights to create and publish comic books based on Joss Whedon's Firefly, and they're starting with a big one.

The first Firefly story told at Boom! begins in Firefly #1 and is written by Greg Pak with art by Dan McDaid. The story focus on the War of Unification, the war between the Alliance and the Independents in which Malcolm Reynolds and Zoe Alleyne Washburne fought together on the losing side, an experience that defined their characters throughout Firefly's run.

"It's high time we got to see the full story of Mal and Zoe's meeting and mission in the War of Unification — the good and bad that the pressure of war brings out in them, and the unforeseeable consequences," Whedon said in a statement provided to Entertainment Weekly. Whedon will serve as a consultant on the series.

"Our story will reveal key experiences for Mal and Zoe during the Unification War that you've never seen before," Pak adds. "And we'll introduce entirely new corners of the star system with characters, organizations, and subcultures that are absolutely true to all the world-building you know but absolutely brand-new at the same time."

Boom! Editor Jeanine Schaefer also commented on what it means for Boom! to acquire the rights to Firefly, which have been with Dark Horse Comics for years.

"Firefly spoke to so many people at the time because of the themes it dealt with and the way it allowed characters to deal with them, and those themes are even more relevant today: found family, identity, and the emotional toll of resistance, to name a few," she says. "Our job is to craft stories that will be exciting and rewarding for Firefly fans that have been with these characters from the beginning, but also to introduce it to a new audience. We want to cement Firefly as a pop-culture touchstone, enduring yet modern, in the tradition of other perennial sci-fi epics that are still teaching us about ourselves."

Boom! is also publishing a series of Firefly Legacy Edition collections, reprinting the Dark Horse Comics Firefly stories.

"It's a huge tribute to the creators of the original show that their rich, intriguing world and hilarious, compelling characters could inspire so many additional stories," Pak says. "We've gotten the incredible go-ahead to do something particularly special in this new series — we're digging deep into the Unification War, the galaxy-shattering event that shaped so many of our central characters. Many of the show's central themes revolve around the way everyday people handle the threat of tyranny, the trauma of war, and the danger of falling into villainy when resisting a world run by villains. We're getting the chance to reveal essential truths about our heroes' pasts and put them through experiences in the here and now that they've never fully dealt with before. As a fan of the show who adores these characters, I can't wait."

Firefly #1 goes on sale in November.