Halo: Uprising

I really haven't had a lot of luck with the Halo graphic novels so far.  This is the third one that I've read so far.  And out of the three, I only really liked one of them; that one wasn't this one. 

Halo: Uprising is supposed to fill in the gap of what happens to the Master Chief in between Halo 2 and 3.  So going into this I was already a bit skeptical; I didn't think anything of note happened in that time.  As far as I was concerned, he jumped onto the Forerunner vessel at the end of 2, then jumped off it when he got to Earth.  But I like Brian Michael Bendis, so I was willing to give this a shot.

Unfortunately, I found it really hard to follow the story.  A lot of that was due to layout and art; sometimes it was a full page spread, but I had no warning of when that would happen so I'd get confused as I read down the page.  The art was also really busy and I often had a hard time following it, particularly when the Chief was killing Covenant, which happened in almost every picture with the Chief in it.

So the Master Chief was doing his thing on the Forerunner ship: killing Covenant, almost getting killed by Covenant, you know, the usual.  And then the story started following some guy on Earth.  A UNSC special forces soldier was captured by the Covenant and tells them about the Key of Osanalan, which is supposed to be located in Cleveland.  So the Covenant attack there, tearing the city apart for this mysterious Key.  In the middle of all that, the story starts to follow a hotel concierge named Ruwan, who is the only one who knows anything about the Key.

The story of Ruwan seemed interesting, but it was hard to follow what was going on (see my above comments about the art and layout).  I also didn't understand what the Master Chief was actually doing through most of the story, other than killing Covenant.  At the beginning he was fighting to stay alive; that much made sense.  It was the later stuff that kind of lost me. 

One thing that I really enjoyed in this graphic novel were the interviews at the end.  There were three: one with writer Brian Michael Bendis, one with the artist Alex Maleev, and one with Brian Jarrard (Bungie Studios) and Frank O'Connor (Microsoft).  All three were really interesting reads and definitely worth checking out if you are either a comic or Halo fan (or both!)