As the world patiently awaits the coming of Halo 3, the good folks at Bungie Studios whet our insatiable appetites with a collaboration with Marvel Comics and a flood of incredible cartoonists. The Halo Graphic Novel hit stores today, and it's a mixed bag of stories and pinups of the Master Chief and his universe.

The original graphic novel is a handsome package. Clocking in at a respectable 128 pages, this full-color hardcover will appeal to the most hardcore Halo fanatics as well as fans of gorgeous sequential art. As I read the book, I was constantly reminded of Heavy Metal Magazine, which is not surprising considering artists Simon Bisley and Moebius have contributed hundreds of pages to the magazine over the years. This is a good thing, because these guys are masters at trippy science fiction, and their contributions are loaded with aliens, violence and all kinds of futuristic madness.

Marvel knows how to make comics, and this hardcover has the highest production values. It's a colorful, well-designed book. One particular feature that I enjoyed is that each of the four short stories has an introduction to them that explains where they fit in the Halo universe. At the end of each story is creator commentary. These editorial bookends are not just filler, but entertaining in their own right.

Since this is an anthology, I've reviewed and graded the four short stories within this collection separately. Let's take a look at each of the stories individually: