The final transformation.
Creative Staff:
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Giuseppe Camanucoli, Cam Smith
Colors: David Curiel
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna
What They Say:
He began his journey as a Jedi with wonder and hope. Now it is time to put away childish things. Vader’s first and most vital test as a Sith concludes.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While I’ve struggled with some of what Charles Soule has done in the opening arc of this as it’s had a kind of pacing that hasn’t sat too well for me, I also acknowledge that a decent chunk of what I need to do with this series is put myself in the right mindset. This isn’t Vader proper as we know from the Rogue One period onward, but more the confused, frustrated, scared, and malleable form that we know from just after Rise of the Sith. That’s a very different character than anything else and while the books may have previously tackled it this is the first time in the new canon continuity that we’re looking at his journey from the end of the film on. And this issue really drives a lot of this home in how you have to reorient yourself with the character.
Having dealt with Kirak, something that I don’t think flowed as well as it should have, Vader’s journey is now moving onto its next destination that Palpatine has set in order for him to really connect with the dark side. This is brutal but figures in with the Sith mentality and plays into what we know from Rogue One as well as he has to journey to Mustafar, the place of his defeat, and really confront himself in order to become one with the dark side. This world is also something of a Sith point as Palpatine talks of how it’s a locus for the dark side. His words are clear in that Vader has to reclaim himself here, to take what broke him, put himself back together, embraced the dark side, and become unstoppable. Which, for the most part, we know this for a few decades afterward as he continues to hunt down Jedi and cements the Emperor’s power.
It’s an intriguing journey, one that is largely wordless but conveys so much thanks to Camanucoli and what he brings here. He and Soule work the story of how Vader has to essentially imprint his pain onto the Kyber crystal in order to bend it to his side to be used in his lightsaber. But this is a journey similar to what Luke went through on Dagobah as he has to face himself, something that even at the start of it he really wonders if he’s chosen the right path. That takes us down the what-if aspect of his life and, to me, it reinforces what Luke sees in him years later, that good that’s still there as his initial instincts are to kill Palpatine and then to plead with Obi-wan to take his life to make amends for the sheer horror that he’s caused. These are small moments writ large and have to be viewed within the context of all we know of the character but also just looking at what has happened up until then. Both sides of this pivotal event are there for the reader to devour but it’s critical to really remember who Anakin is at this point and to know that this is the true period where Anakin ceases to exist.
In Summary:
Camanucoli puts together some great pages here with the flashbacks to the past with the panel layouts while Anakin makes his transformation as it highlights the things that have meant the most to him and have stuck. I’m still not completely on board with some of Camanucoli’s designs for Vader, especially when he’s torn up a bit, but it’s again a period where we have to remember that this is a very different Vader, the young Vader with the phantom muscle memory of how he moves and fights with the first blush mechanical adaptations. Soule pulls all of this together well – though I’ll quibble some with what we get between Tarkin and Amedda in the final pages because it feels like it conflicts a bit with the Rogue One: Catalyst novel – as this really is that moment where things change. For Obi-wan, it happened earlier but for Anakin, this is his true end.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: September 5th, 2017
MSRP: $4.99
