Poor and disappointing - Rated 
Having been collecting comics for 25 years and owning thousands I consider myself to have a wide variety of examples of what makes a good strip. This book does not constitute one of these examples, as although the art is good it is the poor content that brings me to this conclusion.
The most annoying thing for me was the style of the letterer for the whole book, everything is in caps SO IT LOOKS LIKE EVERYONE IS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. Poor choice not to use lowercase at all and just think of an annoying board post or email you have ever received from someone who types in caps. Large sections of Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor and Breaking Quarantine don't have any dialogue anyway, so that doesn't apply there.
Last Voyage is the longest story and I was confused by the art and it just passed me by. Armor Testing ended before it began and Breaking Quarantine is irritating by its complete lack of dialogue, just consisting of strip and despite saying it fills in the blank of Johnson's escape from the Flood, it doesn't. It looks like it got printed before the SHOUTING LETTERER got a chance to mangle it and as non-dialogue strip is uncommon it always looks strange anyway. The only story I did enjoy was Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa, but as with three of the four strips it is far too short and rushed.
That is the major flaw with this `collection', they seem to be rushed, short filler stories where it could have worked so much better as one full length novel especially as it is padded out at the end with 26 pages of gallery pictures, nearly twice as many pages as three of the four strips occupy. Of 128 pages only 85 pages are strip.
If you're a Halo extremist then I suppose it would be part of owning a collection, but even with my love of the games and extended universe I could have lived without ever reading or owning this which is a shame as I was looking forward to getting it. Ultimately it is an attempt at a pretentious coffee table book complete with pompous and arty explanations of what the creators were trying to convey. Again, shame they didn't invest the pages used for that in strip but I suppose it saved on printing costs.
If you have £10.99 to spend on Halo books then I would suggest you forget this and buy the text novels, the first three give an infinitely more enjoyable background story to the fall of Reach, what happened on Halo outside of the game storyline and the Human fight back of First Strike than this ever could. They should have left it to the academics to write theses on the cultural impact of Halo and kept the graphic novel for reading enjoyment.
nice but shallow. - Rated 
At the price you can get it here, there is no excuse not to own this book if you're even remotely interested in Halo, Comics or interesting artwork.
All of the comics are densely illustrated with strong plots and good readability. The extra stand alone artworks in the back are also excellent.
But its by no means perfect. None of the main comics are particularly long and they all end rather abruptly.
Even the longest, Last voyage of the Infinite Soccur, feels as though its was heavily cut down. The ending is very anti climactic. There is very little effort to explore the character of Half Jaw and his unit. Nor is there much development of the flood, which is supposed to be the point of the whole story.
Similarly the explanations of each story is quite brief. The entire book feels very much like it was rushed.
But what is there is all excellent.
Brilliant! - Rated 
A brilliant book to own if you love or are interested in the Halo Trilogy!
Marvel publishings dida great job on this book! They got some great artists and some great writters to work on the various stories within this book!
Some superb artwork, which is different in each story, as each story is different and has a different artist and writter!
Plus, at the back, there is a fantastic picture gallery with some top notch Halo still life action pictures!
Well worth picking up, a must have for Halo fanatics!
Rob
Diverse stories of a large galaxy - Rated 
At first when I picked this up it was in a sealed packet and the cover has the Master Chief on the front, I was expecting stories of him and his adventures. But when I started it I realised it wasn't.
The book is essentially four different comics, of different stories by different artists and writers. I enjoyed it, both from the stories and the art.
Each tale is of someone in the setting of Halo. The stories fill in some background that we never knew from the games, this was a positive thing for me. The art styles all are very different, I had a big happiness at the Slaine-esque art that reminded me of being 10.
After the comics is a short discussion from the art team member incharge of making the graphic novel. She describes her passions and the processes in making the graphic novel. It goes into some depth and gives the making of problems and solutions.
If you are into finding out about how others have designed and developed ideas, I reccomend the graphic novel purely for this. If you have an interest in the Halo story it is also a big plus.
REALLY REALLY S**T! - Rated
Lets get one thing clear, i LOVE HALO. i love the game, i love the books (buy them their better) and i love the whole storyline. BUT when i brought this book or graphic novel as they like to call it, i was so ticked off about how much i spent on so little. the layouts good and feels nice and solid it felt but that was the only good thing, and lets be honest that sucked. I had waited for this book since the beginning of the year and man was i disapponited. There are 4 storys, 1 of them if pretty good and is actually like a comic, the second is just about the suit that master chief wears (yey), teh third is about how johnson escaped the flood but only in the 'weapon cache' part not the rest of the story and the fourth which i thought would be amazing was the worst. that layout of it sucked, the colours used sucked and the storyline for it, guess what, it sucked too!
when i brought this to be honest i did have to higher hopes of it being good and about Master Chief's fight against the convenent, but you only see the big man once and thats at the very beginning. i seriously think that if your going to buy this try to get it cheap, like here or ebay.
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