The final volume, the longest, starts with another synopsis, but this time it summarises Halo's misadventures as she rambles through the known worlds, until she ends up destitute, at age 29, on a nasty little world called PWUC. There she is reunited with Toy, and with nothing better to do, enlists in the Armed Forces, where she is told she will rarely see action. As it turns out the military, headed up by the giant General Luiz Cannibal whose has massive implanted tusks, is engaged in a long-running battle on a series of worlds called Tarantula. Halo and her new friends quickly see combat, which result in some severe psychological changes for Halo. I particularly liked the combat sequence on the heavy-gravity world, where 15 minutes in the Crush is the equivalent of two months outside the high gravity zones. This is Moore's most political volume of the series, where he gets to examine religion, the effects of war on soldiers, the propaganda of war, and the pass-the-buck attitude of politicians. The series ends with Halo finally getting out by commandeering a cruiser to explore the galaxy on her own terms.

The fact that the story was told in episodic fashion is obvious when you read the entire story in one sitting, but on the whole it avoids being too fragmented. In each arc Moore usually inserts a stand-alone story about a subject he's interested in. Overall I was most impressed with the third volume, which is the longest, and displays a great deal of character development for Halo. While there are some serious subjects broached in this volume, Moore keeps with his main theme: the individual's desire for freedom. Halo is an everywoman, and, as she is quoted as saying: "Anybody could have done it." What's more interesting about the series is Halo's struggle to keep moving forward, to exorcise her past ghosts, and to look to new horizons despite her problems. Halo has no special abilities or an expense account; she's a working class future hero who makes her own destiny, with plenty of mistakes, and along the way she has many adventures. Ian Gibson's art work is fantastic: stylistic black and white curvy-sharp characters, with marvellous ships, costumes and creatures. There are small story gems in the series, such as zenades: a grenade that puts your opponent into a Zen-like state of meditation and non-aggression, and sputstik: a defensive spray that makes someone vomit (rather similar to the "sickstick" concept recently used in Minority Report). For those of you who follow Alan Moore's work then this is a must-buy, because in The Ballad of Halo Jones you can see the development of some of his early ideas, along with reading some funny and poignant stories.