When they started work on last year's hit TV show, Heroes, the producers decided to market it online in a unique manner by creating a weekly comic book related to the show, which would be offered for free on their web site.

The comic tends to be just 6 pages long each week, but as the producers write in an interview, that comes out to full comic length every month. Though it continues to be freely available at The Heroes website, Wildstorm (a subsidiary of DC Comics) has now produced a handsome hardcover book of the first 34 chapters of the comic book, which covers the first season of the show, from the premiere episode to "How Do You Stop an Exploding Man?", the finale.

The Story

The stories of the comic books are all intended to be side stories, largely related to the episodes that are being broadcast at the time, but revealing details that weren't shown on the screen.

The comic begins with strips #1-12 offering vignettes on the main characters from the show. Thus we get Mohinder becoming a taxi driver, Hiro contemplating heroism, Nathan using his powers, Claire surveying the damage after she wrecks the quarterback's car, etc.

With strip #13, the focus of the comic shifts, as the writers becoming willing to tell longer stories. Thus #13-16 are a four-part origin of Wireless, while #17-18 offer backstory on Ted. There's also a nice six-part story set in Vietnam in #24-29 which touches upon two of the Elders.

Another change with strips #13-#34 is that there's an arc concerning Wireless and the work that she's doing for a certain member of the TV show's cast, which helps to give the comic strip some focus that it was missing in the earlier strips.

The Storytelling

Generally, the writers of the Heroes comic have set themselves a pretty hard task, balancing the needs of the show and the strip.

There are some slight continuity errors that you'll probably pick up only if you've seen the show recently, but the larger problem that the strip faces has to do with its viability as an standalone story.

On the one hand, if you go too far toward the TV show being the ultimate arbiter of what's going on in the Heroes universe, then the strips are irrelevent. I felt like this was largely the case with the first twelve, but maybe that's because I know the characters much better than viewers did when the strips first appeared.

On the other hand, you can go too far in the other direction and have stuff in the comic that should have appeared in the TV show. Want to know why Wireless appeared in that one episode, then disappeared forever? Want to know why Noah Bennet was worried about Molly Walker, but not the satellite system that tracked people? It's all in the comic.

(Though it was only the sudden appearance and disappearance of Wireless that threw me off on the TV show, and now I understand why.)

Despite these issues, the Heroes comic does do a fairly decent job of respecting its boundaries. I enjoyed the latter two-thirds of the volume quite a bit. I felt like I learned a tiny bit about the Heroes universe, and I also enjoyed seeing some new tales set therein.

The Artwork

The art is done by a wide variety of different artists. Their styles run from somewhat cartoony to murky but simple. They all tended to have bold lines and relatively solid colors, making them fairly decent matches for each other. The fact that the art style changed from one comic to another wasn't always noticeable, and definitely never disruptively so.

The "covers" of the individual issues are Isaac Mendez pictures, which is to say drawings and/or paintings by Tim Sale and Dave Stewart. We've seen most of them on the show, but there are some I hadn't seen before. They're all very nice, and they're laid out as very cool looking artifacts, complete with 9th Wonders! covers and fraying edges.

I suspect the art style of the individual artists was generally selected to look somewhat like Tim Sale's style, which is a pretty solid starting point.

The pages are all laid out as normal comic books, which is notable only because that's really not the way to produce comic books for the web, but it's of course exactly what you want in a printed collection like this.

(And having said that, I took a look at how hard it is to read the comics online, and personally I thought it was pretty hard; screen resolutions just don't do it for printed material yet.)

Conclusion

Overall, I was pleased with the Heroes collection. It doesn't offer the same expansive possibility of a true standalone comic book like Buffy Season Eight or the Eternal Champion comic books that Michael Moorcock has written, but still it's a nice complement to the TV series.

The actual book that's produced is beautiful, with a hardcover, glossy pages, those aforementioned issue covers, and even a short interview about its creation at the end.

If you're a Heroes fan, the question isn't whether you want to read this comic book or not, but whether you'd prefer to have a nice hard copy or to read it on the web. I'm not a web-comic type of guy, and thus the choice was obvious for me. If you're on the fence, go read strips #13-16 online, and then decide.