A curious bit of closure.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Salvador Larroca
Colors: Edgar Delgado
Letters: VC’s Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
It seems a battle from Yoda’s past has come to Luke’s present! Luke has stumbled upon the last native on the planet…and the stonepower is strong with this one!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Star Wars franchise in comic form is getting ready for its next crossover event with The Screaming Citadel and it’s something that I wish had started a bit sooner. I’ve enjoyed a lot of what Jason Aaron has done with this series, and this arc in particular, but it became one that just ended up running too long overall. What made it salvageable at times was the use of three different periods of stories being woven together and the fantastic artwork from Salvador Larroca. This is the kind of ideal episode that I would have seen as a one-off, or even a two-parter, during the Clone Wars TV series if it had been able to reach into the future to tackle the original trilogy cast and events.
Luke’s arrival on this world is something that does not go well in a lot of ways because Garro is pretty much just a mess after everything that has happened over the years. With it being a couple of decades in general between when Yoda went through things here and Luke’s arrival, a lot has changed with Garro the last of his people that’s there and still fighting this war against the mountain. His anger is seething and his view of Luke as a Jedi is one that has him ready to bring him to an end, to give himself some closure on this war. It’s kind of roundabout in a mumbo jumbo mystical kind of way, but Luke’s patience actually pays off and his intent on trying to see things through from the journal with what he learned third hand about what Yoda went through brings it to a close while repeating things a bit. It’s not the most definitive and blunt of endings, but it has the right kind of mystical element about it.
Thankfully, we do get a bit more time here with Yoda in seeing how he altered the path of this world. It’s hard to say if it’s justified in a sense because he’s interfering with the path that these people were on, but his holding action against the mountain as it returns to the surface in anger is well done, even though young Garro just wants to see them both destroyed. But what Yoda does here is to return the planet back to the creatures that were essentially burrowed in and asleep, allowing them to return to the surface once more and stride across it in big and small form. The problem for Garro, which takes him decades to really come to grips with, is that it caused all of his own people to eventually leave this world. He never could, obviously, and that makes him quite the tragic figure in the long run.
In Summary:
Though I was fairly well engaged at the start of this arc, the more it went on the less interest I had in it in terms of story. It became less defined as it progressed and it went on too long overall. What salvaged a good chunk of it for me was simply the artwork as Larroca delivered in a big way for me with great looking layouts, some richly detailed backgrounds, and solid character artwork. All things that Delgado brought to life even more with his color work. I liked the ideas behind it but it was just too much material that should have been done in tighter form.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: All Ages
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: April 5th, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
