“A Clear and Present Dengar”
Creative Staff:
Story: Ethan Sacks
Art: Natacha Bustos
Colors: Arif Prianto
Letterer: VC’s Travis Lanham
What They Say:
“A CLEAR AND PRESENT DENGAR” The most underestimated bounty hunter in the galaxy in his greatest adventure yet! DENGAR makes his move — and the Underworld will be forever changed. Meanwhile, time is running out for T’ONGA and her crew to break VUKORAH… Will a young girl pay for their failure with her life?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
My hesitance at the start of this series at the time of its original release is still there because something about it more often than not just doesn’t click. Certain elements work, especially when focused on Valance, but the variety of the cast and the bounty hunters themselves aren’t as compelling as you’d hope. That said, I’m enjoying taking it at my own pace a fair bit later and knowing that there’s a lot ahead of me as well. The book comes from writer Ethan Sacks and it has a pretty solid feeling overall as we get to see the slow growth and exploration of this fairly complex character and his history. With this issue, Natacha Bustos guests on the artwork, and Arif Prianto is a very familiar name within this franchise for the comics so it looks and feels quite good with the variety of characters and some of the seedier aspects of the concept.
Unfortunately, while the actual execution of the book is done well, the material itself continues to just not do a lot for me. The book converges at the end but the two main stories unfolding aren’t interesting at all. We get more time with T’onga as she tries to get information out of Vukorah but the reality is that T’onga is just too “nice” to go up against someone like her and isn’t able to get done what she needs to in threatening her for the information she wants. And Vukorah so knows that and plays against it well. She’s not even sure that Bossk would go the full distance but the uncertainty works in Bossk’s favor in a way. There’s some decent back and forth with the crew overall about this as they continue to try to find Cadeliah but mostly it just feels very uninteresting and, worse of all, boring.
The other half of the book is focused on Dengar. And while Dengar and Valance worked well enough, Dengar by himself is just mind-numbingly dull. I don’t mind the character but the look barely worked when I had the figure back in the 80s and it doesn’t hold up well under Bustos’ artwork. Here, we get him mostly trying to make a play against Khamdek but this comes after a flashback with Han on Corellia years earlier that I don’t think adds anything but filler to the story. I know, the book is about bounty hunters and not just Valance, but the stories for most of them and the characterization for so many of them just isn’t that interesting. Watching Dengar get one up over on Khamdek and only doing so because of the backing of Crimson dawn doesn’t make him interesting. And some of his lines made me feel like he was mimicking Joe Piscipo from Johnny Dangerously. Once.
In Summary:
The book desperately needs to get past this storyline and into something more engaging because it’s just getting worse by the issue. It’s populated with characters that don’t work well and stories that aren’t interesting at all. It’s playing in some familiar areas with a couple of known characters but it’s also tied up in the Crimson Dawn mess that doesn’t serve the storyline well at all. The Marvel problem has infected so many of the Star Wars books over the years with the need for crossovers feels strong here as there’s no cohesive core storyline going on anymore, just material in service of the crossover.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 9+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: June 1st, 2022
MSRP: $4.99
