Hey everybody,
I’m continuing to make my way through the 2020 series of Marvel Star Wars comics, having reached the Crimson Reign crossover event when I last posted about this stuff. Crimson Reign was volume four for each of the four series here – Star Wars, Darth Vader, Bounty Hunters, and Doctor Aphra – and once we saw how Qi’ra’s machinations to sow discord and create chaos for the Empire fit with each of the main storylines, they all kinda branch off a little bit, and continue their own tales.
Darth Vader: The Shadow’s Shadow is something of a fascinating storyline. Sabé has come to the realisation that Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker, and at the end of the last volume she confronted him with this knowledge. She goes on to explain that after the Battle of Naboo, Padmé sent Sabé and Tonra to Tatooine to help liberate the slaves, with the express purpose of liberating Shmi. While Sabé couldn’t find Shmi, she nevertheless freed hundreds of slaves, and took them to a new colony on Gabredor III. However, the local Imperial Governor is threatening the slaves as she makes her bid for power, backed by Crimson Dawn. Among the slaves freed are Kitster and Wald, who are older now, but it’s interesting to see how Vader reacts when confronted by his past like this. There is a gratuitous scene of Vader piloting a podracer Kitster has built, but overall I am enjoying how the Vader series is progressing.
Star Wars: The Path to Victory explodes with an opening that sees a Rebel assault on an Imperial parade, as the newly-consolidated Rebel fleets launch an attack to announce to the galaxy that they are still out there. As part of the Crimson Dawn plan to cause problems for the Empire, a family escapes from a secure Imperial weapons development facility, and Luke travels to Coruscant to bring them into the Alliance – the facility, of course, is none other than the second Death Star, and so we’re now seeing the seeds of this sown. Meanwhile, Leia and Amilyn Holdo take a holiday to Spira in the core, where Holdo attempts to bid on a Nihil starpath engine, in an attempt to locate the fabled Kezarat Convoy to gain some much-needed fuel for the Alliance. Though outbid, Holdo later steals the engine and hooks it into their starship, however it takes them to No-Space where the Nihil used to hide from the Republic.
I like how Holdo is being used more in these comics, as she is sold as one of Leia’s closest friends in The Last Jedi. It’s interesting to see how she has basically taken on the role of Winter from Tim Zahn’s original Thrawn trilogy, as she has been part of a link with Crimson Dawn to secure supply lines and so on. However, the Kezarat Convoy plotline is uncomfortably close to the Katana-fleet story from Zahn’s books for me, and while I’m sure it’s fun for plenty of folks who enjoyed it, all these High Republic story-nods we’ve been seeing have been somewhat… forced? I don’t know, they feel somehow out of place for me, like characters are only referencing them without any further historical context. I mean, it’s like somebody today whose only historical references are of the Regency era, and they’re incapable of talking about the Tudors or Victorians.
Doctor Aphra: The Spark Eternal continues to disappoint me. Aphra is possessed by the ancient Sith-wannabe Ascendant created thing called the Spark Eternal. I think it’s meant to be some kind of method for allowing the Ascendant folks to mimic Force powers, but they never quite got it off the ground before they were wiped out. A few thousand years later, the Spark has been able to achieve some kind of sentience, and is now a malevolent force. Meanwhile, Aphra is trapped inside her head with the creator of the Spark, and Sana Starros gathers a team of former Aphra supporting characters to help rescue her. It’s annoying, and not very interesting, though unfortunately it does prove to be somewhat important to the Hidden Empire crossover event that’s coming up next, so to some extent is required reading for that!
Doctor Aphra, at one time, had so much promise as a character, but it feels so much like her stories are pulling against what Star Wars is. She’s a “rogue archaeologist” with a reprehensible personality, a morbid fascination with Darth Vader that is somewhat inexplicable given how he is supposed to be the Emperor’s deadly enforcer. She makes snarky quips like she’s Peter Parker, and on top of all of this, her book has fast become the title where Marvel seems intent on putting all their gay characters. Now, I have no interest in the sexual orientation of, well, anybody else, if I’m honest, but the way it is constantly drawn attention to in this book makes me vaguely uncomfortable. However, to make things worse, we also have a new character in the Aphra book now who is non-binary, which again, I don’t really care about gender identity, but because all of this is concentrated here, it begins to affect the storytelling. I can imagine if Marvel had spread all of these characters out more, they would potentially risk annoying a wider fanbase, and so it’s perhaps seen as “safe” to risk in just one book, but for me, it seems like it’s too much, and indeed, the Sana Starros storyline draws attention to it on multiple occasions.
None of this is meant as some kind of “anti-woke tirade”. I find Aphra (the book and the character) irritating because the storyline is just inane, not because she’s gay.
But anyway…
Bounty Hunters: Raid on the Vermillion was quite a difficult book to track down, and I ended up having to get it from America. Anyway. The book has seen a bit of a split since the early days, as T’onga’s crew carry on their bounty hunting while Valance has been repurposed and is back in Imperial service. T’onga leads her team on, well, a raid on the Vermillion, the Crimson Dawn fortress flagship, as she attempts to rescue Cadeliah and unite the warring crime syndicates on Corellia. For this, she enlists the help of Dengar, who is working for Crimson Dawn and attempts to double-cross everyone as he seeks to gain enough credits to escape the bounty hunting life and retire with Manaroo. I do like how this element of his character has been kept from the old EU. T’onga is surprised to discover that Cadeliah is not a prisoner of Crimson Dawn, but is actually being groomed by Qi’ra to take over as a criminal boss.
T’onga is forced to leave Cadeliah with Crimson Dawn, and so takes on a job to protect the Pykes as they celebrate on a nightclub space station that orbits dangerously close to a black hole. Obviously, panic ensues as fighting breaks out between the Pyke Syndicate and Kanjiklub, and while they are able to make it out alive, Tasu Leech is tempted to return to his old life in the fighting pits of Nar Kanji.
Again, there are some interesting callbacks to the new canon media such as the sequel trilogy (Kanjiklub) and others, and while I’ve said before this isn’t an attempt to give the sequels a pass, I do like to see how they are being further enmeshed into the overall Star Wars galaxy. Indeed, what I said before about the callbacks to the High Republic being bad, this is a better way to do it because it makes things like Kanjiklub feel less out of the blue, and more consistent.
There are some interesting threads here, and maybe I’ll have to revise my opinion of some of these books when I’ve read more, but for now, I think the Vader series is the forerunner, while Bounty Hunters and the ongoing series are somewhat fair to middling, and Aphra is certainly on the bottom.
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