Filling In Some Stories

A robust and well built universe lends itself well to expansion. Once you have a universe running, you can add on any kind of side stories, expanded materials, or other media as you like. There are always pockets where new stories can be told, where characters can be pulled aside to have their own adventures free of the constraints of the main stories. Any character that mentions they once did something in their past could, in theory, then have that note expanded into an entire adventure for us to read, watch, or play later.

Naturally the counterpoint to that is that not every story has to be told. For a good example of that we need only look over at Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was a perfectly acceptable movie that didn’t really need to exist. It’s not bad, on its own, but so much of the film is taken up with referencing plot points we’d already heard about before. Sure, Han Solo did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, but wouldn’t you like to see how he did it? Just because a side story could be explored, that doesn’t make it essential to do so.

I got strong Solo: A Star Wars Story vibes reading through the first collection of comics based on the universe of The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization.. The collected trade, The Expanse: Origins, takes each of the main crewmembers of the Rocinante – James Holden, Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton, along with their frequent passenger and sometimes ally Josephus Miller – and gives them a tale from the past history, fleshing them out further. While the idea is interesting from one perspective, considering these are scenes that were only hinted at but never shown before, the obvious problem is that these stories weren’t previously shown for a reason. They don’t really change our opinion of the characters or affect the world, leaving the stories feeling slight and unnecessary. A good prequel can change our understanding of characters in interesting ways. These stories aren’t that interesting.

Holden’s story is the focus of the first issue in the collection. The story takes us back to when Holden was a UNN (United Nations Navy) officer. We already knew from the show that he was bounced out of the Navy for striking a superior officer. As we’re shown, Holden is a naturally likable officer that helps out his fellow shipmates. He doesn’t get along with his commanding officer, who he finds to be too rigid, too much of a stickler for the rules as written. This comes to a head when their vessel comes upon an unregistered ship. They hail the ship, try to get the registry, but the ship won’t respond. The commanding officer says they should fire on the ship, but Holden disagrees, stating there could be people (and not just illegal weapons) on board. This leads to Holden taking a swing at the C.O. (but missing, potentially on purpose) before getting laid out by his commander. Their captain then suggests that the Navy isn’t really for Holden and that, at their next port, he should withdraw from the service and find some other line of work.

This story shows us how Holden ended up leaving the Navy, while also illustrating to us that Holden is an idealist that will stick to his morals even if it gets him in trouble. That’s great, except that’s also Holden’s arc throughout The Expanse. We already know he’s an idealist, and we’ve seen it get him into trouble repeatedly. We also knew he had been kicked out of the Navy, and while we hadn’t seen the finer details of it before now, what we see doesn’t really add any shading or nuance to the matter. The specific incident that gets him kicked out happens in only a couple of pages so it barely feels climactic. If Holden has been wrong (he wasn’t) or if perhaps it led to problems for his ship (it didn’t) then there could be an argument that he should have learned to temper his actions (which, of course, he never would). The story doesn’t go for that, though, and it leads to a weak reveal of events we didn’t really need to see to retread character beats we already knew. It’s just not a great comic issue.

The second story focuses on Naomi. We find her soon after she’s left her ex, Marcos Inaros, and she’s working as the chief engineer on the Canterbury, an ice hauler (that everyone should know from the starting episodes of the television series). Naomi likes the ship but doesn’t want to make connections to any of the crew. She’s sad, cut off from humanity, and would prefer to be left alone (as a kind of self-punishment after building tech that killed hundreds of people). But then she gets a new assistant, Amos Burton, and finds someone as closed off and disinterested in humanity as she is… and the two become friends.

I have less of an issue with this story than I did the first one. While we knew that Naomi left Marcos after he had her build, effectively, a bomb and then used it on innocents, and we also know they she ended up on the Canterbury as the engineer, and came to have Amos rely on her as “his person” effectively, we didn’t get much of a story about how that happened. Amos isn’t the kind of person to just accept anyone. But seeing her and him slowly bond over technology, and then acknowledging their past misdeeds, adds more to their relationship. She doesn’t have him as a friend because he defers to her; he sees a good person in her and he needs that to guide him. And for her, she finds someone that doesn’t judge her for her past, it’s what’s inside her that really counts. I like this aspect of their friendship and it helps color them in. I wouldn’t call the story essential, but it does at least provide some fun context to their past.

This is then followed by a story all about Alex Kamal and, well, it’s completely disposable. Alex, as we know from the show, had a wife and son once. He was a pilot serving in the Martian Congressional Republic Navy (MCRN), and he loved flying. However, when his wife becomes pregnant with their second child (the first time a pregnancy has gotten far enough along to likely be born), Alex gives up his commission to be a planet-bound man. However, being planetside is terrible for Alex. He can’t stand it. He’d do anything for his family, he thinks, but being stuck on one planet is almost too much for him to bear. When his wife loses the child, it breaks Alex and he takes a gig flying out into space. This leads to his marriage dissolving, but it’s just the way it has to be for him.

Alex’s story is entirely stuff we already knew from dialogue on the show. He had a wife and son, he left them to fly because he couldn’t take being on a planet. It bothers him, but he won’t stop flying. The comic issue gives us pictures to look at, but it doesn’t really do a great job of making his wife or kid feel like real characters, and it certainly doesn’t add anything new that we didn’t know before. Sure, he and his wife were trying for a second child, they lost it, and that is sad, but Alex was wanting to get into the air even before that. The sadness drives him, and it’s likely why the marriage dissolves… but doesn’t that really change anything about the character. Nope. Alex did what he did, and his arc on the show is about accepting that. This story doesn’t change that in the slightest or add real depth to his character. It just doesn’t work.

Amos is next and, honestly, I was really hoping for this story to be good. I like Amos a lot as he’s one of the more colorful and interesting characters in the series. Unfortunately this issue squanders him in a truly bizarre tale. Amos he’s into a fight with a couple of scavengers trying to steal a haul needed for others. Amos gets in the way, gets hit, then gets up and knocks the shit out of them after. But in and around these simple events we see Amos in some kind of fantasy where he’s playing on a trivia game show and he has to win or die. He wins, they die, end of story.

Thing is, the story tries to show us some nuance for Amos’s character, giving us a snippet of a time where he was growing up with another kid at an orphanage of some kind before he’s sold off to work the streets. This isn’t really new information, but Amos taking that lesson and learning to always put a smile on his face (that empty, creepy smile he does) is certainly something. However, the sequences set in a fantasy in his head don’t make any sense. Why a trivia show? Why have him play a game? He’s not psychotic, at least not in a Harley QuinnCreated to serve as "Joker's Girlfriend" as well as his primary minion for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn quickly grew to be one of the most popular characters of that show, eventually finding a solid life beyond the cartoon in comics, movies, and media. way, and this all feels very out of place for Amos. It’s a story from a different series, not The Expanse, and it doesn’t work here at all. Amos needed something different.

Finally we come to the fifth issue, which was a bonus made for the trade paperback release. It focuses on Miller, back when he was still working as a Star Helix cop on Ceres. He and his partner, who he was also in a relationship with at the time, were on the edge of breaking a case against a criminal kingpin, but they could never quite catch him in the act. One of his contacts, a teen looking to get off the street and get a real gig, offered some info to Miller if, in exchange, Miller could help get the kid a job with Star Helix. It was all worked out… right up until the kid’s friend rats him out and gets everyone killed (well, everyone other than Miller).

When we meet Miller on the show he’s jaded and depressed. He’s not a very good cop anymore, and he’d lost the woman he loved because, well, he was jaded and depressed. This story does help to fill in some color as to how that all came about but, in all honestly, it’s not really needed. Without this story we understand that a lifetime of being a cop and seeing the dark underbelly of Ceres has worn Miller down. With this story we see one incident in a multitude of them, and we still understand that a lifetime of being a cop wore him down. It’s not what happened in his past that matters but what he does when he gets the case of Julie Mao that comes to define him, and this story doesn’t add anything to that at all.

On the whole that’s really my issue with most of this collection: these are all prequel stories that can illustrate moments from these characters’ pasts, but the stories don’t change our understanding of them at all. It’s a few slight pages, each, to take a moment we heard about a flesh it out so we can see it. But the moments weren’t shown to us because, for the most part, they don’t matter. And in the one case where the collection does take a big swing, with Amos, it does so in the worst way possible because I have better things to turn my attention to.

I love The Expanse and I’m generally on board with the idea that “more of The Expanse is never a bad thing. This trade, though, tests my patience for that. It’s slight, it’s a little boring, and it does nothing for the characters or the series. It’s the kind of comic I read and then never go back to again.