Minutes later…
Creative Staff:
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Jesus Saiz
Colors: Jesus Saiz, Arif Prianto
Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
Now, after narrowly escaping the dark lord’s clutches, and wounded and reeling from the revelation, Luke, Princess Leia, Lando Calrissian, the Wookiee Chewbacca and the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 must fight their way back to the Rebel Alliance—for the fate of the entire galaxy is at stake! After so many losses is victory still possible? But, what Leia, Luke and their rag tag band of freedom fighters do not realize is that they have only traded one Imperial trap for another! Enter the cunning and vengeful Imperial Commander Zahra, at the helm of the Tarkin’s Will!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With five years of comic based stories set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, Marvel now sets its sights on the shorter period between Empire and Return of the Jedi. Setting Charles Soule to chart that course is welcome in my view as I still rave about his Lando miniseries and his Vader run was solid. With this larger opening installment, Jesus Saiz is on board as the artist and he really nails this across the board. It’s not the photorealism we’ve seen in other works but it captures things in illustration form wonderfully, whether with characters or ships. It has the larger epic scale it needs but when it zeroes in on the emotional moments for the characters, it comes across as real and honest and in tune with what we know from our theatrical experience.
What I like right off the bat is that it does start from where the film left off but not quite. Here, we get to explore the period between the escape from Cloud City and when Lando and Chewie head off in search of Han. In this period, Leia and Chewie are very frustrated to say the least over Lando and he’s just doing his best to survive at this point and find some grounding to work with. The back and forth over it is solid and Leia’s commandeering of the Falcon for the Rebellion makes enough sense, especially since Chewie goes along with it. Amid all of this, we also see Luke sitting off to the side grappling with what he learned from Vader about being his father. To make matters worse, he realizes he passed Han in Cloud City and could have rescued him from Boba Fett as well, which while not sending him down a spiral reinforces the kind of mindset that he has at the moment.
All of this leads to the group heading to the rendezvous point that was set up recently, which is problematic since it’s been pinned down by an Imperial blockade. This introduces us to Commander Zhara, an up and coming strategist that’s using some new techniques to try and crush the Rebellion where she can. It’s a solid piece where the Rebels are taking a pummelling but we’ve seen a lot of that recently and it’s feeling a bit weak. It’s all in service of an action moment so it’s easy enough to kind of let it slide, especially since you see Luke in the Falcon grappling with trying to shoot from the cannons with one hand, and seeing Lando trying to get involved in things while there’s a lot of distrust around him. Zhara gets a decent bit of attention and a little chastising from Vader about not destroying the Falcon, and I’ll be curious to see how well Soule develops her over the next arc or two.
In Summary:
While the big winner here is Jesus Saiz as he delivers a fantastic looking book that has me excited to see what creativity he’ll be able to bring to the book, I’m definitely curious for Soule’s approach. I liked his Vader series as it explored him as he cut away the Anakin persona and was finding who Vader would become. The group dynamic for this series is going to be different without Han and that opens up some possibilities to work with and some tensions. The opening handles things well in general but it’s the character time that shines as the space battle material just falls a bit flat since it feels like we’ve hit that story a few times already. There’s a lot that can be explored, and some fun areas to touch upon as well if they get to lean on some of the novel material or even the Rebels side, and I’m excited to see what Soule wants to do with this era.
Grade:
Age Rating: 9+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: January 1st, 2020
MSRP: $4.99
