“Children of the Storm Chapter 4: Into the Occlusion Zone”
Creative Staff:
Story: Cavan Scott
Art: Jim Towe, Marika Cresta
Colorist: Jim Campbell
Letterer: VC’s Ariana Maher
What They Say:
INTO THE NIHIL OCCLUSION ZONE! JEDI MASTER KEEVE TRENNIS has disobeyed direct orders from CORUSCANT and entered NIHIL space. Her mission: to find and save a soul who was thought lost. Familiar faces from PHASE I of STAR WARS: THE HIGH REPUBLIC return…but not as they used to be!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
My relationship with the High Republic era continues to be complicated simply because I’m only really engaging with the comics, outside of one of the early novels. Thankfully, Cavan Scott is writing this series and he’s been one of the better comics writers and heavily involved on the novel side so it tends to dig a bit deeper than some other books. And this one is working to seed the next phase of this era in some familiar ways. For this issue, we get Jim Towe as the artist this time on the artwork with Marika Cresta back again from the first issue and they do well in capturing the Star Wars work so there’s a solid bit of familiar “house” style with it here and the execution is pretty strong as expected since there’s a lot of familiarity with previous works for The High Republic era to build off of.
With this series being the strongest of the High Republic works I’ve been reading lately, this installment does a lot of good stuff but also feels like it’s doing too much and not taking enough time to breathe. It does take that time but it’s moving so quickly through a lot of things. The initial battle in space is over fairly quickly but the point isn’t the fight itself but how Ceret is operating in order to get the information they need. He pretty much treats the droid in a disturbing way and that leads to him later starting to work over Lourna in a similar way to get information. There’s clearly a problem with Ceret as even Terec can barely look at him but Keeve is blinding herself to it in order to find Sskeer. That opening fight does have a good moment for her within it as well as she talks about her first time doing a spacewalk and it helps to reinforce the bond she has with him and why he means so much due to so many things.
Things eventually lead them to a world where reports of Sskeer being seen have come in but we know just how dangerous it is on this side of the Occlusion Zone. Keeve is just focused in a way that’s blinding her as we said, but it helps that they end up coming across two other Jedi here to help and fill in some of the blanks from past events. They do talk about taking a breath to catch up and make a plan but Keeve is all-in on Sskeer and even opts to go in search for him with Lourna in tow while the others attend to Groonal who has suffered a lot since the Occlusion event. There are some neat moments in catching up on what happened to him and Obralin after the Starlight Beacon fell and everything else so that works well, though they’re going to get caught up in their own problems. For Keeve, well, she’s just setting herself up for some hard disappointments.
In Summary:
I know it sounds weird to say the book should slow down when it does take some slower time to work through things here but the events of this issue felt like they would have worked better spread out across two issues with more time for dialogue and exploration instead of just going from place to place and event to event. It’s got breathing room but it needs more in different places to ease things out a bit. That said, it’s still a solid and engaging book that’s answering questions, getting us closer to things, and providing more character material in small but important ways so that it comes together. The Ceret stuff is just blatant and it’s frustrating to see it being pushed to the side by the characters but what’s al little Jedi hubris among friends?
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: March 6th, 2024
MSRP: $4.99
