“Padawan”
Creative Staff:
Story: George Mann
Art: Eduardo Mello
Colors: Ornella Savarese
Letterer: Studio Ram
What They Say:
Deep within the ruined spaceship, the secret of the Nameless is finally revealed. Trapped and surrounded by enemies, the Jedi Pathfinders and Path disciples fight desperately to escape the swarm of hungry monsters. New alliances are tested, and in order for our heroes to escape, some will make the ultimate sacrifice.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The stories of the High Republic era are definitely fun even if I’m still struggling with the period in some ways. With a few other projects in the mix for this period, Dark Horse has this four-issue High Republic book that wraps up things as it leans a bit more into the younger set than one might think but delivers a solid enough experience. George Mann wrote a lot of Doctor Who previously, which feels ideal for some of this, but he wowed me with Engineward a couple of years ago, so I’m curious to see how all of this will play out. He’s joined by Eduardo Mello on the artwork with Ornella Savarese doing the color design and it has a good feeling about it with some interesting character designs and a good sense of ship flow that feels like it sets it to this age a bit since it’s supposed to be a couple of hundred years ago.
The run has been interesting in a way as we get a look at this time period, roughly four hundred years before the Battle of Yavin, but it’s had the problem of not giving us time to really connect with the characters or know them more than just the very basics. I’m hard pressed after four issues to name too many of them and as they die it just feels a bit by the numbers. With the strange creature that the Jedi were dealing with outside having no made its way in, the chaos inside is starting to pick up. It should feel like something out of Alien but we really only get two very up-front encounters with them and they’re both done by Sula. Others are falling to it along the way but off-page. Sula, to her credit, loses an arm the first time around in a pretty dramatic way and then loses her life in order to distract them while the others get away.
And that getting away is orchestrated by setting the engines up to explode as others have made their way into the ship and we also have all these dangerous eggs as well that will be a real problem. So having Pako do that – only to die along the journey – plays out well enough as we get a chaotic escape. It’s full of the usual sacrifice elements that young Coron has to learn and it provides Rok a chance to become someone capable of taking on a Padawan again later. But even the fallout and epilogue is muted because it’s done through the non-flashback sequence as it turns out her master’s master was trained by Coron. It’s a loose connection and why she’s able to tell the tale but the entire framing of the story truly felt superfluous and didn’t help to make it more interesting or give them something to do themselves. Did we even get her name? I don’t remember it from previous issues and she’s not named in here, though her droid is.
In Summary:
The series is one that’s basically a simple space opera story that if you had changed one or two minor things, such as mentioning the force and maybe lightsabers under a different name, you’d basically get a story that could have been told since the 1940s in science fiction magazines. It’s pretty by the numbers with pieces that don’t feel like they add anything to it and in fact detract in my opinion. There’s a potentially interesting cast of characters here but no time is given to develop them and not even much in the way of archetype material in order to make them being chased by dangerous aliens workable either. The whole thing just didn’t come together right and left me curious if they could stick the landing thanks to the framing but ended up not doing so. I can forgive a whole lot when it comes to Star Wars, having read comics from it going back to 1978, but this definitely needed more grounding and character to work.
Grade: C+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: May 17th, 2023
MSRP: $4.99
