I have a bad feeling about this.
Creative Staff:
Story: Gerry Duggan
Art: Phil Noto
What They Say:
RRRRrrrRAAAAHHHGHGGGG! Errf errrf errff AAAAANNNNG! GGGGGNNNNNaAaAaAaAaA!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Chewbacca series has been less than thrilling as it does things that simply don’t click well for me. While young resistance fighters that aren’t exactly rebels aren’t a surprise, the old adage is holding true in that it’s never good to work with kids. Combining that with Star Wars is just double plus ungood in general as Zarro is a weak link to be sure here. Chewie can certainly carry a single issue or a chapter in a novel if done well, but a five issue miniseries is just overkill by about two issues. Especially for a story like this that should be tighter. Normally I’d fall back on just enjoy Noto’s artwork but even that feels out of place here in the Star Wars universe. And I hate saying that.
With things going from bad to worse in stopping Jaum before things with the Empire are cemented, we now have Zarro coming up with a crafty plan to save the day. It’s not exactly the most well thought out plan, but what Rebel plan has been? So I can’t hold that against it, but seeing all the adults going on along with it while not realizing what a farce it looks like is just headache inducing. Zarro’s plan is to pack up an R4 unit full of explosives, get it into the spaceport and onto Jaum’s ship so that it can blow him and everything else up, thereby severing the relationship with the Empire and saving the day. As a skeleton of a plan it’s not bad, but plans never go accordingly and this one certainly doesn’t. And it really shouldn’t the moment a stormtrooper saw Chewie in a droid Halloween costume equivalent.
Frankly, I was ready to just close the book right then and there because of the leap it wants you to make in either taking it seriously or just laughing with it. I just end up laughing at it, unfortunately. We get a decent action sequence that takes up the bulk of the book as we have Chewie dealing with Jaum, his bodyguard and the stormtroopers, while Zarro has to try and ensure the droid gets aboard. There are some nice moments to it and Noto’s layouts work well, but there’s just an emptiness to the design that keeps it from feeling real and grounded enough to connect with. The humor is decent where appropriate, but I kept coming back to how much of a sore spot Zarro is and that this plan really and truly should not have worked anywhere near as well as it did. And it didn’t really work well either.
In Summary:
With one more issue left it’s not hard to commit to following through on it. I really waffled up through the day before release whether to cancel the subscription to it or not, but I felt I owed myself to see it through to conclusion in hopes that it could find its way. While this issue is better than the last few it still has so many things that simply don’t work well within the context of this universe that it just feels very out of place. After the strong series we’ve had so far since Marvel kicked off their run of books, I’ll easily give this one a pass overall. But it’s certainly not one that I’ll find myself recommending, giving me the first caveat for these books in that arena.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: November 25th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
