Re-reading Star Wars: Dark Empire in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker, because clones

Star Wars: Dark Empire had been in the back of my mind off-and-on ever since the announcement of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as the comic book series was my very first exposure to any post-Return of The Jedi "expanded universe"/not-from-the-movies stories (Stories that have since been designated as non-canonical "Legends" after Disney bought Star Wars and the plan to produce new material set during that time period more-or-less necessitated wiping the setting clean of the scores of comics, novels and sundry other content already filling up that story-space).

Dark Empire became increasingly present in my mind in 2015 when I got my first look at Supreme Leader Snoke, who looked far rougher than even the age-ravaged (and Force-lightning-reflected-off-a-light-saber-ravaged) Emperor Palpatine, who, in my own wondering of who from the third trilogy was connected to whom from the first trilogy, I suspected of being a failed clone of Palpatine.

And then, when Palpatine made audio appearances in the trailers for Rise of Skywalker, Palpatine's resurrection via cloning technology and Dark Side space-wizardry seemed all the more likely; that is, after all, how he made his return from his death at the end of Jedi in the pages of Dark Empire. Hell, as the final film, Rise of Skywalker started flickering before me in the theater, I even suspected that Rey herself was a clone, perhaps of Palpatine, but more likely of Anakin Skywalker, which I thought would explain a lot.

Well, as it turned out, Snoke was some sort of clone (although not necessarily of Palpatine; all we know for sure from the film is that Palpatine and his followers grew Snokes in vats); Palpatine himself was not some sort of clone, he just somehow survived his death in Jedi and then spent a few decades hanging out, constructing a plot so byzantine it doesn't make a lick of sense to me; and that Rey is not a clone either, but the biological daughter of Palpatine's biological child, that he made biologically, by having sex with a lady at some point. (Gross, I know.)

I didn't care for that out-of-left-field revelation at all, and actually preferred my pet cloning theory, as cloning at least is something that happened a lot in the Star Wars-iverse, in the Expanded Universe, sure, but, with the prequel trilogy, in the films themselves, as well. At any rate, it made me want to revisit Dark Empire, which I had previously experienced both as a comic book series and an "audio drama" on CD.

That comic book series, written by Tom Veitch and drawn by Cam Kennedy, was a six-issue miniseries released by Dark Horse in 1991, just eight years after the release of Return of The Jedi (although in my young life, that felt like a generation, as I was six-years-old when I saw Jedi in theaters, but a full-fledged teenager when Dark Empire began its release). While not the first of the post-Jedi expanded universe stories—re-reading it today, it's clear a bunch of stuff happened between the party on Endor and the first pages of Dark Empire—it's pretty close, following close on the heels of the events of the Thrawn trilogy (The first Thrawn book, Heir to The Empire, was released the same year as Dark Empire, and the Dark Empire comics and Thrawn books came out roughly concurrently, although I see that the three Thrawn books are now slotted into the timeline as having occurred a year before the Dark Empire stories).

It's a really beautiful-looking comic.

The most immediately striking aspect is the coloring, which Kennedy appears to have handled himself. It doesn't look a whole hell of a lot like any Star Wars film made before it or since, in large part because of how moody its lighting is, and how limited the palette. The comic looks hand-painted with watercolor, giving the shots of space and planets from orbit a more evocative, fantasy-illustration feel than anything attempting realism (It's a space fantasy, after all; why be real?). Each setting and scene seems to have a dominant color. An early battle shows blue machines and soldiers scrambling over brown terrain. Luke confronts the resurrected Palpatine in an all-green scenes with touches of yellow here and there. Once Luke has turned to the Dark Side and Leia confronts him, all is either black or a shade of red...all save the droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, who are blue.

Despite the excellent likeness of a mid-1980s Mark Hamill on Dave Dorman's cover for the collection (above), or of the Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and the various costumes and ships on the individual covers of the six issues, Kennedy himself draws the characters, rather than the actors playing the characters, so in the pages within, Luke, Leia, Han and Lando don't stand out as celebrity likenesses. There's a lot of Kennedy in all of the characters and the art, and not a lot of photoreference.

That's extremely refreshing reading this after reading a Marvel Star Wars trade paperback every month or two, and I can't help but wonder if the fact that this was being conceived, designed and drawn back in the late 1980s and early 1990s had something to do with it. Surely Kennedy had access to an incredible amount of visual reference material of the actors in these roles available to him, but it wouldn't have been quite as easy to access back then as it would today.

The other striking thing about the book, beyond how beautiful the damn thing is, is just how much has changed since then. While the three films of the original trilogy still serve as the foundation for everything, so much more has been filled in since then in the other two trilogies, two spin-off films, several TV shows and God knows how many comics and novels and video games that it's weird to go back in time to see such an early Star Wars story that has since been proven "wrong" by later ones, in the same way that, say, re-reading Marvel's original Star Wars comics from the late 1970s and early 1980s, one comes across an adventure of Ben Kenobi as a Jedi Knight that looks nothing like what we would see in Episodes I-III and The Clone Wars, or seeing Jabba The Hutt appear as a weird-looking humanoid alien before the people drawing the comics knew he would end up being a giant slug monster two films later.

But let's get started, shall we? A long time ago, 29 years ago being pretty long I think, in a comic book...

(Play John Williams' fanfare in your imagination here)


THE CRAWL:

The trade paperback collection I'm reading, opens with a lengthy recap of...stuff that happened between the end of Jedi and the point at which this story begins, I guess. It is arranged on the paper in a way that's suggestive of the films' crawl, with the words receding into the distance, but, because these words aren't actually moving, it's more suggestive of it than a completely faithful recreation. There are also a lot of words on these pages. More, I would guess, than in any of the crawls from any of the nine, numbered "episodes" of the Star Wars films.

The gist is that The New Republic has managed to wrest control of only three-fourths of the galaxy from the Empire, while the imperial remnants still control the remaining fourth. There was no real leader among these remnants though, despite Thrawn's "deft assault, nearly bringing the fledgling Republic to its knees." After Thrawn's defeat, the various Imperial factions were civil-warring, and the Rebels—I guess they're still called "rebels", despite now controlling more of the galaxy than not?—use captured Star Destroyers to "conduct hit-and-run sorties" into the war zones, and you know what, I'll just let The Crawl tell you the rest:

One such raid, over the raging Imperial City battleground, ended in disaster: the Alliance Star Destroyer Liberator, commanded by Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian, crash landed on the planet's surface. As our story opens, Princess Leia Organa and her husband Han Solo, together with the Wookiee Chewbacca and the protocol droid C-3PO, are on a daring mission to rescue their fallen comrades.

So yeah, a lot of stuff must have happened elsewhere. Like, I missed Han and Leia's wedding, for example! How did that go? Was Chewbacca the best man? Did Luke give Leia away, or did the Force ghost of her dad do it...?

PAGES 1-3: The story opens on the Millennium Falcon, with lots of tight shots of the aforementioned characters' heads as they bark stuff at one another, preparing to come out of light-speed as they near Coruscant, where Luke and Lando are. Oddly, the first line in the story is Leia warning Han about the dangers of doing so too closely, which he shrugs off, followed by C-3PO warning him of the same, and Han threatens him. The Falcon comes out alright, as does one of the two "Alliance escort frigates" traveling with them, but not the other one. That ship immediately collides into some of that same battle debris and explodes, taking, as the dialogue notes, "a good frigate crew" with it.

It sure sounds like everyone was basically warning Han that their current course of action could get someone killed, and then it did.

Kind of an odd way to start the story.

PAGE 4: Han radios the remaining ship to stay in orbit while they take the Falcon down to look for Luke and Lando, and the pilot of that Frigate responds, "Nyeb Mlu, Solo--"

Hey look, it's...that guy! Wait, I have to look his name up. Oh. Yeah. It's Nein Nub! I hate that guy!

His face always bothered me as a child. (I was an easily bothered child, remember. Most of the first act of Return of The Jedi terrified me.) I didn't like the slick look of the space between his upper jowls and his lower jowls, which looked wet and sticky. And I didn't like the top of his head either. Or his all-pupil, black eyes.

Is it...species-ist to look at another alien race and be like, "I don't like that guy because of the way he looks...?" Like, if I were a Star Wars character and was like, "Ugh, Nein Nub is so gross; I hate him because of the way he was born looking" that would obviously be totally wrong. But is it okay to dislike an alien race because of its looks when that alien race was something some make-up effects people put together...? I don't know. It feels wrong. I guess it's something I should work on before we make contact with any alien races, in case they are gross ones like whatever Nein Nub is, and not sexy ones, like Twi'leks, or cute ones, like Ewoks or Baby Yodas.

PAGE 5-8: After two pages that are basically splash pages of the Falcon zooming into the Coruscant battle zone from orbit, with a few inset panels and dialogue balloons explaining what's going on, we get a glorious two-page spread I regret being unable to scan. Veitch's excited narration box tells us that "mutinous Imperials are deadlocked with forces loyal to the Emperor's inner circle" for control of the planet, and Kennedy has filled the pages with Storm Troopers and Imperial war machines, all rendered in a cool blue, engaged in a zig-zagging ground fight that the direction of which is impenetrable from the outside.

Kennedy mixes things familiar from the movies with things summoned from his imagination and strange crosses between the two. So in this image, we see two giant, dog-like AT-ATs walking across the uneven brown and gray ground, while in the background the Millennium Falcon whizzes by, and TIE fighters and an AT-ST are also visible.

In the foreground are a couple of strange tanks, one of them appears to be something like a metal fortress on treads, with a gigantic gun turret on top, and small guns placed along its sides. There's something that looks a bit like a TIE tank, although since its smoking on the ground, it's possible it's really just a TIE fighter so destroyed that its wings now resemble tank treads.

Crouched behind big, ruined metal pieces that appear to be parts of destroyed vehicles are armored soldiers firing laser beams at one another. Some look like standard issue Storm Troopers, some look like Scout Troopers, some look like new creations of Kennedy's own, with squarish helmets. Some of these have red circles atop their helmets, presumable marking them as members of one team or the other.

I think these are the sorts of images that are all too rare in Star Wars comics today, as here there is just so much brought by the artist into the extant setting. I'm sure there are perfectly good, perfectly logical reasons why we see less and less of creators just making their own shit up all the time in Star Wars comics these days, but it is one of the fun aspects of the older comics; there's a real wildness to them. (The further back you go, the truer this is, too.)

PAGE 9-12: Dialogue tells us that Imperial walkers have Luke and Lando pinned down, and so the Falcon begins the business of shooting down walkers. The most interesting bit on this first page isn't necessarily the group of indistinguishable humans firing blue lasers from their blasters in all directions, but the pair of figures crouched off to the left. Apparently some Ewoks signed up with the Rebellion/Republic after Endor.

They can be seen again on the foreground on page 11, and then shaking hands withe Chewbacca once the Falcon lands and the crew meets up with Lando. Luke, we're told, ran off to investigate some Dark Side shit, and now that the Walkers are down, a small army of scavengers roll up in what looks like a window-less SUV (one with wheels,no less! Its makers obviously aren't taking advantage of the seemingly ubiquitous anti-gravity technology.)

PAGES 13-14: The scavengers rush to strip the Falcon, releasing a pack of "cyborrean battle dogs" to stop our heroes. Leia poses like she's flicking water off her hands, saying she's going to try to use the Force to stop them, when suddenly they go flying...! But it wasn't her, it was "a shadowy figure, menacingly familiar" that steps out of a hole in a wall. The caped figure, just a smokey blue silhouette on the other side of a curtain of dust, has a hand raised, in the next panel, we see the black gloved hand of the figure emerge from the curtain of shadow and smoke, and all of the attacking droids explode:

Here's a good example of Kennedy just doing his own thing. Obviously, all of the various varieties of imperial battle droids we'll meet in the prequel trilogy and the security droids from Rogue One haven't been introduced, so Kennedy just makes up his own droids that look vaguely like ones that might exist int he same place that the likes of C-3PO and that doctor droid thing exist. They are with the scavengers though, so they might be assembled from broken droids and other junk. Note the foot of the one on the far right; it's the same basic shape as a walker's foot, although I would guess somewhat smaller.

PAGES 15-17: Ha ha, did you think that Darth Vader shape was Darth Vader? Don't be silly. He's dead. It was Luke Skywalker all along. Apparently from just the right angle, his hood looks like Vader's helmet in silhouette.

Hey, remember that part in The Last Jedi where it looked like Luke might use his Force powers to take on a bunch of First Order walkers all by himself...? Well, here we takes on one walker all by himself.

He uses the Force to generate a force field (or should that be Force field?) to block a few laser blasts, and then he reflects a blast back into it (I don't know; is this the first time a lightsaber is used to bat blaster fire back at a shooter? I know it happened on the regular during the prequel trilogy and Clone Wars period, and Luke seemed to block some blaster shots during the Sarlacc Pit fight in Jedi, but not necessarily lob them back in the way that common in the prequels).

It may also be worth noting that Luke's lightsaber is here blue, as opposed to green or yellow. This was before lightsaber color was such a thing, of course, and, I suppose, the blue was likely an artistic choice made by Kennedy, as opposed to anything meant as a symbolic reflection of the moral alignment of a Force user. All of the laser blasts have been blue so far, too, rather than red. We'll return to the matter of lightsaber color later.

PAGES 18-23: This whole sequence is a great example of Kennedy's use of color. On the first page, a spooky-looking Luke tells Leia, Han and the others to get lost because it's his destiny to stay here and face a vast evil and so on, and the scene is all green, save for the black of the lines Kennedy has placed on the pages and the dark coloration of Luke's cloak.

The palette adds a few more colors as the scene shifts to orbit, where what looks like a huge portal in space embedded in a dark cloud travels like a comet, and then lands on the surface, eating its way towards them. Inset panels continue to show Luke, bathed in green.

The characters then shift to a pink, as Luke eventually prevails on his pals to all get the hell out of Dodge—Leia, for her part, reluctantly—while only Luke and R2-D2 remain. On the last page, everything is now red as the mouth of the storm comet portal reaches Luke.

PAGES 24-28: As Luke, R2 and a bunch of wreckage get raptured up into the sky, our heroes return to Pinnacle Base, and then there's some catch-up business, with various Rebellion leaders making talking-head appearances: Mon Mothma, Admiral Ackbar, The Guy With The Beard.

We get a look at the current Rebel base, built on a world with enormous red spires, and then everyone gets together for a meeting about the state of the bad guys. While various factions were civil-warring, "someone...or something...has been biding its time" and they have reason to believe "a dark side genius is at work...creating new technologies that go beyond all previous conception...."

On this particular moon, the ships are guided through the big red rock formations by "curious creatures" called Ixlls, and I assume is that bat-like thing there is an example of one. I've puzzled over them for a while, and I can't tell if it his holding a large round object in its hands (there appear to be small clawed thumbs clutching something), or if that's part of the creature. I also can't guess at its size, if it's mean to be as big as the ships are or much, much smaller, and only look big due to how close it is the reader's persepective.

PAGES 29-32: Over a series of four splash pages, dialogue in narration boxes name and reveal the new imperial super-weapons, called "World Devastators." They appear to be gigantic ships, far, far larger than Star Destroyers, that function sort of like titanic vacuum cleaners. They "consume everything in their path.. ...In their holds great furnaces and factories process the cataclysmic feast into raw elements... and new weapons of destruction!"

We won't see it for a while, but what that colorful language means is that not only do these machines carve swathes of destruction, but the stuff they suck up gets turned into fully robotic TIE fighters that they can then spit out to defend them; they are, in essence, mobile, self-sustaining spaceship factories.

I would like to here take a moment to point out how nice it is to encounter a Star Wars story in which the Empire comes up with a super-weapon that isn't just some form of planet-destroying laser beam. Episode IV had its Death Star battle station. Episode VI had a second Death Star that was in-progress, but fully operational. When Episode VII came along 32 years later, the new Empire, the First Order, had "Starkiller Base," which was just a bigger version of a Death Star. And when the saga finally ended (or "ended") last year, it was revealed that the new new Empire, The Final Order, had a fleet of Star Destroyers, each equipped with a special laser cannon that could blow up a whole planet in one shot.

I mean, get a new trick guys.

PAGE 35: This page features one of those examples of something in the book that reads as wrong today, on the other side of the prequel trilogy. Luke refers to am imperial dungeon ship as, "The kind they used to transport Jedi Knights during the Clone Wars..."

I can't say I recognize it from the Clone Wars, but then I did skip the TV show...

PAGES 36-40: The dungeons ship lands on a pale red planet  identified as Byss, surrounded by long, blue imperial ships. Luke and R2-D2 are taken directly from the ship into a floating energy cage, and transported through a strange blue city full of bizarre architecture and sentient beings in elaborate robes. None of them look particularly Star Wars-y...for example, despite some these appearing to be Emperor Palpatine's personal guard, they don't resemble the bright, red Imperial Royal Guard from Jedi. Aside from the fact that they wear robes, of course.

Among the most interesting looking are those that seem to perform some sort of sentry-like duty. They are giants:

I particularly like them because not only are they a sort of character unique to this comic and not from any of the movies, but they sure look like the kind of thing that could have appeared in a 1980s-made Episode VII, with some poles and animatronics under a robe, you know...?

Anyway, Luke Force-shoves some dudes out of his way and tells them he's here under his own free will, and then he marches to meet someone in a swivel chair, the chair's back to him, as the scene shifts from blue to green and, who could it be?

PAGES 41-45: That's right, it's Palpatine.

It's a somewhat odd reveal, really, as there's no dramatic moment with the chair spinning to reveal Palpatine or anything. We just get a close-up of Luke's face, followed by a close-up of Palpatine, looking off to the side.

Palpatine explains that he has lived for a very long time, and "died" repeatedly, each time his body decays under the power of the dark side, he moves into a new clone of his original self. "I live primarily as energy...formlessness... and power!" he explains. This...makes much more sense than whatever the fuck happened in Rise of Skywalker, where the film just sort of glosses over the fact that Palpatine has been alive since the end of Jedi, living as some sort of burnt-up, mummy of a marionette attached to some sort of life support thingamajig or something.

J.J. Abrams should have read more comics!

Anyway, Palpatine would like to seduce Luke to the dark side, and while he turns his chair to a porthole and starts explaining how cool the World Devastators are, R2-D2 hands Luke his lightsaber and asks him "Boop?" (Which is, I guess, droid for "You want to stab this guy or what?") But! Palpatine has laid a trap for Luke, as while Luke tries to decide whether he should saber the old guy or not, Palpatine tells him "Surely you know that if you strike me down, in anger, I will live again!...Perhaps I will even live as you!"

So Luke has no choice but apprentice himself to Palpatine, learn the secrets of the dark side, and then try to defeat him. The sequence ends with Luke taking a knee before Palpatine, and R2 asking "WEEE BDEEP?", which is probably droid for "WTF?"

PAGES 46-48:

Han says "I've got a bad feeling about this." Leia's been having magic Jedi feelings about how much trouble Luke is in, and so the gang is going to go and try to rescue him.

PAGES 49-56:

Lando and Wedge lead the rebel fleet to Calamari (not Mon Calamari, just Calamari), where they engage the devastators, and learn that they are actually giant mobile robot TIE fighter factories. These pages contain some pretty cool battle imagery from Kennedy, once again mixing old Star Wars stuff with new, original stuff that nevertheless looks like it fits. Things aren't going great for the rebels, as Lando loses his second Star Destroyer, when it gets eaten by one of the devastators. He also says that he has a bad feeling about something, which is overkill; once a movie (or, here, "movie") is enough, thanks.

Of note here is that when the rebel fleet shows up, one of the imperial officers orders an underling to "Inform Supreme Commander Skywalker of their presence." So I guess it didn't take too long for Palpatine to install Luke as the Boss of The Empire, and for the the whole Empire to get on board with it.

I'm not master strategist like Palpatine, but I have a feeling there's a fairy high likelihood that making his greatest enemy his right-hand man might backfire.

PAGES 57-62:

Leia is visited by a vision of Darth Vader, which slowly morphs into a spooky-looking Luke, who warns her not to look for him. Luke is just a face floating in a cloak, which is all splotchy blue and green water color, surrounded in an aura of white lighting. Their communication is interrupted by the Emperor, and when Luke's specter disappears, he seems to turn into pure, white lightning and shoot out in every direction of the room. It's another great image in a comic full of them.

After some conversation, preparation and a costume change for Leia, she, Han, Chewie and C-3PO board the Millennium Falcon, heading for a port moon that is a haven for smugglers, and where Han hopes to find help arranging transport to "the deep galactic core," where Leia's Force powers tell her Luke is.

PAGED 63-69:

They make it to the port, although they are immediately met with angry bounty hunters. Apparently, having killed Jabba The Hutt in Jedi made Han, Chewie and now Leia far more wanted then they were before. They reconnect with some friends of Han's from back in the day, Shug Ninx and Salla, and they plan to borrow their ship The Starlight Intruder for their rescue mission, as soon as it's ready.

PAGES 70-72:

While the ship is being worked on, Han and Leia go for a stroll (that's her in the hat, jacket and enormous pair of MC Hammer pants). This scene is a nice example of how fluid the Star Wars comics universe still is. Other than the Hutt in that second panel, Kennedy is apparently free to draw whatever he wants, rather than sticking to extant alien species.

During their stroll, Leia meets an extremely old woman who introduces herself as Vima, a former Jedi of two hundred years who, "In the time of the dying...Vima hurled herself down among the lost...to escape the great scourge." So jeez, here's another Jedi who survived Order 66 and Vader and company's hunt for surviving Jedi. How many is it total? A dozen? Thirty-five?

Anyway, Vima senses the Force in Leia, tells her that she contains "the spark that will rekindle the fire," and gives her a small, decrepit, rectangular box. When Han and Leia look away, Vima disappears.

Han then takes Leia to his ruined apartment, where his old busted-up droid butler is waiting for him, repeating "FZT...A Mr. Fett to see you, sir..." over and over.

PAGE 73-79:

Hey, it's Mr. Fett!

This is the fan-favorite character's very first appearance after meeting his apparent demise in Jedi. By way of explanation, all he offers Han is that "The Sarlaac found me somewhat indigestible."

Kennedy draws a pretty great Boba Fett, and would go on to draw several Boba Fett comics for Dark Horse after this. Boba is here allied with Dengar and a couple of other, non-name bounty hunters. Han and Leia escape pretty easily from them, by simply turning around and running out the door. A running gun battle through the streets follows, terminating when they see the Starlight Intruder rising up from its...garage, I guess...?

Safely aboard the ship, Leia opens the package she got from "Vima-Da-Boda," the narrator giving us her full, sillier name, and finds that it is a light saber. Holding it, Leia suddenly get s a vision of Luke commanding the Empire's forces, and it's a super-cool image. I like that better than any of the available covers for this series or its collections, really.

Again, it seems to me that that Palpatine and The Emperor accepted Luke as Executive Vice President of Rebellion Crushing awfully quickly here, but I suppose that could be just one more way that this series reflects the films—time seems to move at different paces in different story lines.

PAGES 80-83:

More battle over Calimari. Lando, Wedge and the good guys are getting their asses kicked when one of the world devastators receives a signal from "The master control computer on Byss" and then self-destructs.

"Whoever's in charge of those monsters is an idiot!" Lando tells Wedge. "You'd almost think he wants to lose!"

Perhaps he is an idiot...an idiot like a fox!

PAGES 84-85:

Fett's triumphant return is a brief one. As Han and company arrive at Byss, the Falcon parked atop the Starlight Intruder, security lowers the planet's force fields just long enough for the ship to get through. Fett and Dengar follow in Slave II, which is not as cool a ship as Slave I, attempting to sneak in right behind the intruder. Instead, the shield slams shut and their ship breaks into pieces, spiraling away as they trade insults. This is the spaceship-flying equivalent of Boba Fett running into a closed door.

PAGES 86-96:

Using The Force, Leia pilots the Falcon right to The Emperor's base, evades a patrol with a Jedi mind trick, and then she, Han, Chewie and C-3PO surrender, while Salla and Ninx, still aboard the ship, use its guns to blast Stormtroopers and escape.

Luke appears to them in another cool, spectral, water-color hologram (initially appearing with a halo of Kirby dots), and he then sends the giant sentinels to accompany them to a clone lab, where they meet Luke and The Emperor.

Leia ignites her new light saber, and does what Jedis generally do with them. She cuts off someone's hand:

The struggle doesn't last long. The Emperor disintegrates her saber with a gesture, creepily strokes first Luke's face and then hers, and then he gives another little speech about how his awesome energies ravage his body, and thus he has a clone program to give him spares.

Leia again uses The Force to try and kill him, knocking a piece of some equipment free to crush him, but it bounces off a force field he erects around himself, and then Force-lightnings her for discipline. Luke and Han have words.

PAGES 97-100:

Salla and Ninx have stashed the Falcon aboard another space trucker's ship to hide it, and they are hanging out in a rather unsanitary-looking space diner when an Imperial Hunter-Killer droid finds them. This looks pretty much like the probe droid from the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, but gigantic. Like, big enough that it's torso opens up and sucks the Falcon into it when our heroes' new friends try to make a break for it.

PAGES 101-105:

The Emperor is in full frail old man mode as he has his guards leave Leia and him alone in his room, as he's clutching his heart and walking with a cane and everything. He shows her a Jedi holochron, which Kennedy draws as a perfect, featureless cube, the blue and green-yellow light shifting in it as its handled by each of them.

He asks her, "Please...help a dying old man into his bed," and as he explains that upon his death that he, "like all great Jedis...like your own father...will drop this fragile flesh." The difference here is that rather than just become a Force ghost, he can inhabit a new body. Like one of his clones, or, and this seems relevant for Rise of Skywalker, "Indeed, I can enter anyone... I can overshadow the soul that dwells therein."

So that plot point from the climax of Skywalker, the one that retroactively made it seem as if that's what the whole final trilogy was about? The groundwork for that was laid out in the expanded universe decades ago, Abrams and company just needed to, like, toss in a few lines of dialogue in one of the, like, nine hours of those films.

When Palps mentions to Leia that he can even enter her unborn child, we get the best part of the whole series:

She straight up flips the Emperor's bed, spilling his frail old man body onto the floor. Oh, and she steals his holochron and books it.

What I wouldn't have given to have seen Carrie Fisher throwing around an old man on the big screen...

PAGES 106-109:

Meanwhile, in an all-red room, and Imperial officer reports to Lord Skywalker that now three devastators have been destroyed due to the tampered-with control signal, and Luke tells him to keep it under his goofy-looking, over-sized hat.

When Leia runs in, he tells her everything's cool, he's put all of the Empire's important secrets in R2-D2 and now they can all flee together. He still has really scary-looking eyes, though.

PAGE 110:

A low point in Chewbacca's career:

PAGES 111-116:

Han and Chewie are in the process of escaping, just as Nynx and Salla arrive to rescue them, a couple of seconds before Han and Leia arrive to free them. All our heroes board the Millennium Falcon and jump to the safety of light-speed, at which point Luke dissolves before their very eyes; he was never really with them, but was still on Byss.

"He used a dark side power to trick us," Leia says.

Interestingly, Luke does something pretty similar in Last Jedi, during his climactic duel with Kylo Ren.

PAGE 117-118:

Palpatine has recovered from being flipped out of his bed by Leia, and is now seated in a chair in his green-lit clone lab. Luke comes to prevent the transference of the Emperor's mind and power into a new clone body, so before Luke can do anything, he...self destructs...?

It's then a race, as Luke starts slicing open vats and killing clones as fast as possible, as "the Emperor's genetic offspring meet mindless babbling death," before Palps' invisible life essence can inhabit one.

It does so, and slowly a young, muscular young clone with slicked-back hair and green mottled skin rises up from a puddle of goo to stand nude before Skywalker.

Luke, unfazed by either Palpatine's threats or the sight of the penis that was used to bone Rey's grandmother, Force-shoves Palaptine into a wall. He ignites a light saber from a nearby rack, and it's on!

PAGES 119-120:

The fight doesn't last long, just three panels and Palpatine is the victor, but there's a couple of interesting things to consider.

The first thing I noticed was that both Luke and Palpatine wield blue light sabers. This may be simply because of Kennedy's very deliberate choices about lighting throughout this book—you'll note this page is all pale blue, sickly yellow-green and black and white—but I suspect this was also before there was much meaning assigned to light saber color, with the Sith always using red, the Jedi blue or yellow, and Sam Jackson purple.

I once had it explained to me by a fan who had three light sabers tattooed on her arm that red is the color of the dark side, yellow or blue is the color of the light, and so-called "gray Jedi" like Qui-Gon Jin used green light sabers. So did Luke in Return of The Jedi. But, this being the '90s, I think this was well before people thought so damn much about every detail of every aspect of Star Wars.

The other interesting bit is that in his dialogue, the Young Emperor says that the Jedi will soon be extinct, and thus "how fitting that one of their precious lightsabers brings an end to the Jedi delusion!"

This seems to not only imply some sort of separation between himself and the Jedi, but to associate lightsabers with the Jedi specifically, rather than also being a Sith weapon. The expanded universe of the novels at this point in Star Wars history is completely unknown to me. Did the word "Sith" even exist yet...? Did they use lightsabers too? Certainly in the original films, Vader does, but not The Emperor, and the films make a point of identifying Vader as a Jedi who turned to the dark side. In the films at that point then, lightsabers are definitely a Jedi thing, exclusively.

At the end of the fight, Luke is sitting on his ass in a puddle of clone afterbirth goo with a lightsaber pointed at him, and a pissed-off Palps tells him that they're going to go get his holochron back from Leia, as well as her unborn child.

PAGES 121-130:

The Millennium Falcon speeds toward the still ongoing battle on Calamari, R2-D2 first freezing the world devastators and then making them crash into one another. Kennedy draws lots of cool shit in these pages, including rebel ships with wings that terminate in pontoons, skimming across the water, and boat loads of rebel soldiers using jet packs and powerful grappling hook-guns to engage with Stormtroopers on the decks of the devastators.

Among the dialogue throughout these scenes, Han yells at 3PO, R2 yells at 3PO and 3PO snaps back at his little friend, Salla mentions making the Kesel run in the Falcon with Lando (Man, don't these people ever shut up about the Kesel run?), Han asks Chewie to call the troops on the the devastators  and tell them to evacuate (which seems an odd task to assign the one character that doesn't speak English/Basic) and, in the best part, Han apologizes to Leia for doubting Luke:

"I guess I'll just never figure ol' Luke out."

"Luke is sacrificing his life for us, Han...for our children. Sometimes the actions of a Jedi make no sense to ordinary men."

Ouch. Leia totally just called her husband ordinary, huh?

His reply?:

"Yeah, who would have thought? Me...father of Jedi. I guess an ordinary guy can do somethin' right sometimes."

I think what he's saying is that he may not be a special magic Jedi like Luke, but at least he fucks.

(For what it's worth, Luke will kiss a lady in the sequel to this, Dark Empire II, but the relationship is short-lived, and about as romantic as Luke's dad's courting of his mom in Attack of The Clones.)

PAGES 131-133:

The battle over, Mon Mothma, The Guy With The Beard and the rebel leaders have a meeting, while Leia retires alone to a bedroom, talking to the Jedi spirit in the holochron. The spirit, Bodo-Baas, gives her a dumb prophetic rhyming poem that starts out somewhat subtly, mentioning "A brother and sister/born to walk the sky", but, a few lines later just straight up refers to them as "the Skywalkers."

Veitch's narration tells us that "Leia ponders the mysterious prophecy," although there's nothing all that mysterious about it: It says she has to help Luke defeat The Emperor.

PAGE 134:

The Emperor has an all-black Star Destroyer that is ten miles long. It's just...ridiculously big. Here it is next to some regular-sized Star Destroyers:

It's so big. On the previous page, Veitch's narration referred to it as being "of prodigious proportions." I am going to have to assume that the Emperor's new clone body has no penis as all. That's the only explanation for the size of this ship.

He holograms into the Rebel meeting and says if Leia brings him back his holochron he will discuss a truce with them. Leia's like, hell yeah, I'll go. She must have figured out the final lines of Bado-Baas' "mysterious" prophecy:

A Jedi-killer wants to tame her.
Now the Darkside lord
comes to claim her.
She must battle join
against this thief,
or the dynasty of all the
Jedi will come to grief!

PAGES 135-136:

Leia arrives aboard the 10-mile long black ship wearing what appears to be a Supreme Court Justice's robe. The Emperor is now wearing clothes, a long black robe with a pointy-upturned collar, making him look as much like Space Dracula as possible. He's busy fondling a floating space sculpture while Luke, wearing a matching black robe, lurks nearby, a red light saber lit in his hand.

So now there are red lightsabers, I guess.

Palpatine starts talking to Leia about how he's going to raise her unborn child and maybe take its body for his own one day and...

...she shoots Force lightning from her belly at him?!

PAGES 137-138:

Luke and Leia almost have a lightsaber duel, but the closest they get is briefly crossing swords, until she talks him down a bit.

Palpatine is now full-on Dracula, I think I can even detect a glimpse of fangs:

PAGES 139-140:

Palpatine calls Vader impotent, in a very Star Wars-specific way:

Oh snap, "the impotent side of the Force!"

This begins the best and longest lightsaber battle in the whole series, although there's only about three blows in it. There's a great panel where Palpatine raises his lightsaber to strike, and it's infused with Force lightning, but it ends, as it must, with someone getting their hand chopped off. Here, Palpatine.

Is it just me, or does someone lose a hand every time a lightsaber ignites...?

PAGES 141-143:

The fight over, Palpatine summons his evil Force storm from the beginning of the story, the one that sucked Luke and R2-D2 up off the surface of Coruscant, to eat his very big ship. Luke and Leia close their eyes, unite their Force power and...somehow send light energy at Palpatine, who is now drooling. He screams as the Force storm starts disintegrating his ship, and our heroes escape in a shuttle, the end. It's quite abrupt.

I think if this were a film, the drama with the Skywalkers aboard Palpatine's giant ship probably would have been intercut with the battle scenes on Calimari, and there would have been some sort of denouement, but then, this is not a film.

This leads directly into a sequel by the same creative team, 1994's aforementioned Dark Empire II, and an abbreviated third installment written by Veitch and drawn by Jim Baikie, 1995's Empire's End, but let's call it quits here.

In conclusion: J.J. Abrams should have made the Palpatine of the Rise of Skywalker a clone and he should have made Rey a clone of Anakin Skywalker.

Or, at the very least, he should have sought more inspiration from this comic which, whatever its faults, featured a better, easier-to-follow return of The Emperor.

On Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and that big, dumb reveal

I was born in 1977, the same year that Star Wars was released, and I am now, like the film-turned-multi-media franchise itself, 42 years old. In other words, I quite literally grew up with Star Wars, and while I don't think I would go so far as to say that I was ever completely immersed in it, certainly not relative to others in the fandom which, after all, includes people who organize themselves into Stormtrooper legions and build their own R2 units, I think its safe to say I'm more than a passing fan, too. I eagerly consumed everything Star Wars I could throughout the life of the original trilogy, back when it was still possible to do so without completely devoting one's life to the endeavor, and afterwards I at least casually consumed most of the "Expanded Universe" material that was of the least bit of interest to me, reading—or at least listening to the audio book versions of—the prose novels and continuing to read the comics in fits and starts, depending on their focus and their creators.

I say all this because, while I might lack the encyclopedic—or Wookiepedic—knowledge of Star Wars that many other fans can boast, I feel fairly well-versed in Star Wars, particularly the strict, filmic canon of 11 theatrically-released films...The Rise of Skywalker being the twelfth.

Now, if there is one thing I know about Star Wars, one thing I am and always have been 100% completely sure about, down to a cellular level, something I was so certain of that I never even paused to consider the possibility, because it was so self-evident one needed not even consciously think of it, it is this: Emperor Sheev Palpatine does not fuck.

I can think of nothing more preposterous than the idea of Palpatine having sex with a lady in all of the Star Wars stuff I have seen, from Chewbacca's dad Itchy watching a virtual reality performance of Diahann Carroll on Life Day, to Wilford Brimley making his home on the forest moon of Endor in Ewoks: Battle of Endor to the giant green Star Wars rabbit.

It's not just that Palpatine was seemingly always unfuckable, even at his youngest, fittest, least-decrepit in 1999's Episode I: The Phantom Menace (and it was revealed in 2005's Episode III that Palaptine's semi-mummified look was the result of Force lightning being reflected back at him by Sam Jackson's purple light saber, rather than the ravages of old age, anyway.)

Be honest now: Would you hit this...?

It's not even that nowhere in any of the first eight installments of the so-called Skywalker saga has Palpatine ever seemed to have spoken to a woman who wasn't played by Natalie Portman; in fact, women were so few and far between in the first six films that it's hard to think of any aside from Padme or Leia with more than a line or six. I mean, what are the chances that Palpatine and Mon Mothma had hate-fucked at one point, or that he put a bounty on his virginity that one of the prequel trilogy's female bounty hunters Zam Wessell or Aurra Sing had collected, with their vaginas? (Certainly he had a a fellow female Sith in the expanded universe material set during The Clone Wars in Asajj Ventress, and her appearances from the Clone Wars animated series is now canonical; I never watched that, so if she and Palpatine were dating at some point, I guess I missed it).

No, more than that, it's the simple fact that, in all of his many, many appearances, Palpatine has never demonstrated an interest in anything other than the acquisition of power and the demonstration of cruelty and evil, concocting ridiculously byzantine plots in order to consolidate his power over the entire galaxy, plots that usually make somewhere between little and zero sense (It's been about 20 years now, and I'm still not sure I can make sense of all of the moves Palpatine made in the course of The Clone Wars to create The Empire; I may never understand his retroactive-as-of Episode IX plan to regain power after getting tossed down the Death Star II's reactor shaft to reassert control decades later). Unlike other Imperial villains like, say, Grand Admiral Thrawn, I'm not sure Palpatine even had hobbies, unless he was really into light bubble opera, and that wasn't just a political nicety he was forced to sit through.

So yeah, I did not like the big reveal of Rey's parentage in the recent supposed conclusion of the Skyalker saga, which is not what the title and the altered line of dialogue that appeared in the final trailer indicated ("This be the final word in the story of Skywaler" Ian McDiarmad intones as Palpatine in one of the shorter, made-for-TV ads; in the film, the word "Skywalker" is replaced with "Jedi").

In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren told Rey that her parents were nobodies who had sold her for drinking money. At the time, I wasn't convinced that was necessarily the truth, as it was narratively unsatisfying, fairly un-Star Wars-ian, and it's not like Kylo Ren was the most reliable source of information; it would certainly have been in his best interest to convince her she had no connection to anyone in the universe save for him, so she might as well join him. I fully expected her to turn out to be related—at least genetically—to Kylo Ren.

I've read reviews written shortly after the release of The Last Jedi in which this reveal was praised, because, when paired with the ending, in which one of the urchins who helped tend the giant horse fox stables on the casino planet is seen using the force, it seemed to suggest a democratization of the force and its powers, that the most powerful warriors who use it weren't by necessity a royalty-like family dynasty, nor must they belong to some sort of warrior caste, but literally anyone could sense, use and wield the force. Anyone could be a Jedi, and thus anyone could be a hero Maybe. I wasn't entirely convinced by that, as it's not like Anakin and Luke were even the most powerful force users ever (Certainly Palpatine and Yoda were as strong or stronger than Luke or Anakin, meaning there were at least three bloodlines of similar power). Also, it was only part two the story. Yes, Luke was told that Darth Vader was his father in part two of the original trilogy, but I expected Lucasfilm/Disney to hold out the official revelation of Rey's connection to the Skywalkers in the third and final installment (Particularly because there were so many other big surprises in Last Jedi).

And, ultimately, Lucasfilm/Disney did hold out to make the official revelation, but they did so in such a way that it probably is worse than Johnson having Ren make the offhanded remark that her parents were nobodies in Last Jedi. Here he once again drops a bombshell to her in the middle of a conversation, completely casually and matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He wasn't lying last movie, he tells her, her parents really were nobodies, but only because they chose to be nobodies: In fact, she is Palpatine's granddaughter. Which means Palpatine had a child. Which means Palpatine fucked, at least once. And this I cannot abide.

I mean, I'd just as soon imagine Yoda fucking as I would Palpatine. And it's not like Lucasfilm/Disney are asking Star Wars fans to imagine the possibility of Yoda having sex, is it...?

So this is pretty poor storytelling. We've known Palpatine was going to show up in Episode IX in some capacity ever since the first teaser trailer, which featured his laugh. Dialogue from him appeared in all the subsequent trailers, and there's even a glimpse of his hooded figure in one of them. Given that this is the third film in a trilogy and there has been nothing in the way of foreshadowing that Palpatine survived The Return of The Jedi, or might still be alive, or had fuck all to do with anything, his very presence in the film, let alone his role in Rey's origin, is so out-of-left field they could have just as easily stuck Jabba The Hutt or Darth Vader or CGI Grand Moff Tarkin in the role of Secret Bad Guy. I'd have to rewatch Force Awakens and Last Jedi to be certain, but I don't recall Palpatine even being mentioned in either film.

And it's not like director and co-writer J.J. Abrams did the best he could with the reveal, either. Palpatine's apparent survival and new plans to re-conquer the galaxy with planet-destroying technology again is revealed in the crawl that begins each of the Star Wars films. The result, then, is that the biggest story point of this film, and thus the the nine-film saga itself, is announced in a recap of the imaginary events that occurred between episodes VIII and IX and in an offhanded remark by Kylo Ren part of the way through the movie.

I think it's safe to say that J.J. Abrams completely fucked up the movie with this, but then, let's not be too too hard on the guy. George Lucas himself fucked up at least half of the six films in the saga when it was still under his control, so, really, fucking-up Star Wars is part of the proud Star Wars filmmaking tradition. The fact that this film was so thunderously disappointing owes more to our heightened expectations by the occasional much-more-good-than-bad Star Wars film like Rogue One or The Last Jedi and, for Star Wars fans who pursue the expanded Universe material, the fact that so many of the comics, novels and cartoons are so much better than any of the actual films, we keep expecting the filmmakers to up their game and, well, it just never--or at least rarely--happens.

I think the "Oh by the way Rey is Palpatine's granddaughter surprise!" reveals was the worst in-film aspect of the film, but, like the previous 11, it had its positive qualities and negative qualities. I was joking when I tweeted shortly after seeing the film that I wished Abrams had ran a few things by me ahead of time, but, if he had, here's what I would have told him about the reveal.

I think Rey should have been a clone of Anakin Skywalker.

If Han, Leia and Luke had all interacted face-to-face with Rey in the first two films and none of them either told her they were here parents, or betrayed to the audience that they might be, then it seemed safe to assume she was not the daughter of any of them (While watching Force Awakens, I thought perhaps she would be revealed to be Ben Solo/Kylo Ren's secret twin sister, and, afterwards, I thought perhaps she would be revealed to be Luke's daughter. By the time Last Jedi came out, I knew the first was a no-go and that film confirmed she wasn't Luke's either).

That's when I started considering the fact that she might be a clone, or maybe something even stupider, like maybe she had no parents, but was spontaneously generated by The Force itself/the midi-chlorians. Remember how Anakin Skywalker, who was thought by some Jedi to be the chosen one destined by prophecy to bring balance to the force, was born of a virgin birth like Jesus, his mom impregnated by The Force...? Well, perhaps Rey was the actual chosen one, and she too was fathered by The Force or, going one better than Anakin, was fathered and mothered by The Force...? (This is stupid, but it is no stupider than Anakin's birth...or Rey being Palpatine's fucking granddaughter).

From Veitch and Kennedy's Star Wars: Dark Empire.

Cloning has been a part of the post-Return of The Jedi expanded universe since at least 1991, when Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy's Dark Empire comics series posited Palpatine cheating death with a combination of Sith magic and cloning technology. And then, obviously, we learned some of the ins-and-outs of cloning in the Star Wars universe in 2002's Attack of The Clones, wherein we learned it played a key role in Palpatine's long-term plan to take over the entire galaxy.

So here was my thinking. Sometime before the events of Return of The Jedi, Palpatine had stolen some of Anakin Skywalker's genetic material (maybe while he was on the operating table at the end of Revenge of The Sith, before he woke up and said "Nooooooooooo!"...?), with the intention of making a clone or clones of Anakin so he would have future chances at breeding apprentices with that powerful Skywalker bloodline. That, or maybe when his own body failed, he had planned on transferring his consciousness into a clone of Anakin. Maybe his untimely death and the collapse of the Empire lead to that plan never seeing proper fruition, but somewhere along the line a clone was made, and it turned out to be Rey.

The advantage of this over her being Palpatine's granddaugther? She would still be a Skywalker—the fact that there is not a Skywalker at the center of the three films that Lucasfilm/Disney have been telling us are part of the "Skywalker saga" seems like a pretty dumb oversight, right?—she would indeed be related to Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, but in a way no one could have expected, it would explain her powers and it would explain the fact that she has no parents and was abandoned by someone or other on a desert planet. There are other ways I think Abrams could have cloned his way out of the question of who's Rey parents were if not Han and Leia and Luke and some lady, and how she fits into the Skywalker saga. Instead of being the biological daughter of the biological child of Palpatine, she could have been a clone of Palpatine himself, or a clone of Luke Skywalker, or even a clone of Leia.

In any case, the basic plot of Rise of Skywalker would/could remain in tact (So yeah, there'd be plenty of other problems, but we'd be free and clear of the Palpatine fucking a lady problem). Palpatine could still be trying to force his essence into Rey's body, but there'd now be some clearer reason/rationale for it: She was created specifically by him to be a vessel for his essence when he was old/dying. It wouldn't solve the problem of Palpatine's return being completely out of left field, but it would at least offer retroactive connection to the earlier trilogies, and retroactively fit the clues to Rey's origins offered.

Anyway, that's what I would have told Abrams if he had run that by me. (I also would have said a lot more Rose, a bit more Lando and get Mark Hamill, Ewan McGregor, Sam Jackson, Liam Neeson, Frank Oz and a muppet, Hayden Christensen and Freddie Prinze Jr. in front of a green screen to play force ghosts for the climax, but we'll talk about that stuff a bit more in future posts). But no one in Hollywood ever runs anything by me.

Like so many of the problems with the storytelling weaknesses of the Star Wars films, though, the backstory of a Palpatine-who-fucks, what was up with his kid/kids, who exactly Rey's parents are or were, and just what the fuck Palpatine's plan was with is Final Order underwater on a secret Sith planet will eventually be decided upon, detailed, straightened out and made sense of in the expanded universes novels and comics and now, perhaps, on Disney+ shows.

That backstory will be be relegated to the fascinating "Aftermath" era between Return of The Jedi and The Force Awakens along with Luke trying to refound the Jedi and all of the other implied adventures that seem infinitely more interesting than what Abrams did in his two films.

Three reviews of Marvel collections I found in my drafts:

Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 2--Secret Empire

Although the second collection of writer Mark Waid and primary artist Mike Del Mundo's Avengers ongoing, this is actually the fifth volume of Waid's run on the primary Avengers team; his All-New, All-Different Avengers was relaunched after about 15 issues, because...because Marvel, that's why.

The turning point presented at the end of this volume, then, in which particular elements of the status quo introduced just last volume shift, may seem somewhat violently sudden, but it is perhaps best read in the context of the writer reacting to the goings-on in the Marvel Universe beyond his control, and as simply the latest necessary course correction rather than Waid quite suddenly thinking better of decisions he just made. As with the events of Civil War II, which took Iron Man Tony Stark out of the cast and helped shunt the younger Avengers off into their own team and their own book, Secret Empire presents Avengers with a big change, and Amazing Spider-Man apparently deals it another.

The first two issues, co-written with Jeremy Whitley of the sadly canceled Unstoppable Wasp, feature Doctor Victor Von Doom, currently wearing Iron Man-like armor and calling himself "Iron Man," teaming up with the Avengers, who are pretty frosty to the alliance. Only Wasp Nadia Pym is really into the idea, in part because of her fan girl fervor for Doom's brilliance.

Both are done-in-ones, with the Nadia/Victor relationship the most notable throughline. In the first issue, Doom stops by for tea, and then recruits Nadia's help in infiltrating a Lumberjanes camp. In the second, the Avengers are on the ropes, thanks to a power-stealing villain, but the Nadia/Victor team are able to save the day, with their science.

Both of these issues are drawn by Phil Noto, whose painterly style is a good fit with Del Mundo's. It was refreshing to finally see this post-Secret Wars Doom drawn at some length by someone other than Mike Deodato, who just draws him as Vincent Cassel for some reason (Still not sure why that is allowed to go on; can't he sue Marvel? Shouldn't Marvel be worried he might sue them for using his likeness like that?). I got lost among the relaunches of writer Brian Michael Bendis' Iron Man books, so I haven't read any of Infamous Iron Man, which Alex Maleev is drawing.

After those, Waid scripts three more done-in-one stories, two of which are set during the events of Secret Empire, and one of which is an epilogue. Oddly enough, they barely refer to the events of the event series, and make sense as tie-ins only if you've read it. If not, well, they stand alone fine, but they likely seem to be extremely odd choices for the title.

First, there's a Thor solo issue, which apparently details where she went after she was zapped away at the beginning of Secret Empire. Narrated by a native being to the dimension she was sent to, it's a nice, solid story of the character's heroism, with a fair degree of humor derived from the clashing cultures thrown in.

Then, Doctor Octopus narrates an adventure featuring Bad Cap's Hydra Avengers line-up of reprogrammed Vision, (possessed by a demon) Scarlet Witch, former Thor Odinson and mercenaries Deadpool, Taskmaster and The Black Ant. It's a very short story, but one that sends them all on a mission they see through to completion, while highlighting the self-serving villainy of some of the members and the tensions inherent in a character like The Odinson working alongside former bad guys.

The final story takes place after Secret Empire and whatever has been going on in ASM, as Peter Parker has apparently lost Parker Industries and possession of The Baxter Building, which is where the team's HQ has been for all of, well, all of just 10 issues. The six Avengers split up into pairs to have conversations with one another. The Vision and Hercules go out for coffee, and the synthezoid expresses his concerns about learning that he is immortal, and gets some surprisingly sage life-coaching from Herc. Spidey tries to find some common ground with The Wasp by inviting her to a science fair, but they get side-tracked by superhero stuff. And Sam Wilson, who here has already surrendered the shield and title of Captain America back to Good Cap but hasn't yet put on his new Falcon costume, pulls Thor aside and tries to convince her to lead the team, since he's no longer Captain America. It's a nice between-arcs breather issue, but then, because so much of the title has been reactive to line-wide crossovers, Waid's Avengers series has, more often than not, been a whole series of these sorts of relaxed breather issues.

Black Panther: The Man Without Fear--The Complete Collection

I'm glad Marvel gave prose novelist David Liss' Black Panther comics "The Complete Collection" treatment, putting all 18 or so issues of the T'Challa-starring comics he wrote between a single pair of covers, because Liss' run on the character might be murder to try to assemble through single issues (The run was previously collected into a trio of trade paperbacks under two different titles). This is because of how weird Marvel is at selling their damn comic books.

After Daredevil event storyline "Shadowlands" and Black Panther-centric "Doomwar," both Matt Murdock and T'Challa need to rediscover themselves. And so Murdock goes away, but he asks T'Challa to become the new guardian of Hell's Kitchen, where the now de-powered Panther decides he will be able to prove to himself whether he's still a total bad-ass without his former magic Panther powers and all the resources of a sci-fi fantasy kingdom to call upon.

And, for whatever damn reason, Marvel decided to make Black Panther the new star of the Daredevil comic book series, changing the title of the series to Black Panther: The Man Without Fear, but keeping Daredevil's numbering, so that the first issue of the new series was Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #513. And then, after about 12 issues, they changed the title again but kept the numbering, so the book was then Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive for a while. Oh, and then there was one of those dumb decimal-point issues, Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive #523.1. (As for Daredevil, when Matt Murdock returned, he got a whole new title with a new #1; I honestly have no idea how any of this works.)

Anyway, none of that really matters for the purposes of this collection, which reads as a complete, 400+-page graphic novel. What little one might need to know about what happened in Daredevil and Black Panther and Doomwar before gets quickly and efficiently explained in a conversation between Murdock and T'Challa in the first issue, and then referred back to organically throughout the story. And, if you're reading the entire Black Panther saga in preparation for the movie (UPDATE: I guess that's a pretty  clue as to just how dang long ago I wrote this review, huh?), well just know that this falls between Black Panther: Doomwar and the beginning of Ta-Nehesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze's Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet.

What will be most immediately evident about Liss' run is the way it looks. Artist Francesco Francavilla draws and colors the majority of it, and his art is highly, highly stylized. It is heavily "drawn" looking in a way that stands out from the bulk of Marvel's comics. His designs are realistic, but stripped down and abstracted in the rendering, with well-placed lines of shading and a lot of usage of darks and shadows. The artist whose work might most immediately jump to mind when reading Francavilla's Black Panther book is, fittingly, that of long-ago Daredevil artist David Mazzucchelli.

Even when Francavilla's not drawing, Liss' Black Panther was fortunate to have some pretty great artists involved. Jefte Palo does a lot of the non-Franacavilla art, and he draws big, bold, exaggerated, muscular figures perfect for all the skulking and brawling in the book's action scenes. As the book nears its conclusion and Man Without Fear turns to Most Dangerous Man Alive, the comic gets more and more Daredevil-y, and Michael Avon Oeming and Shawn Martinbrough do much of the art. Both are great, and neither are too far removed from Francavilla's style, although Oeming is the artist who most sticks out as different from the others; his highly cartoony take calling to mind that of that other famous Daredevil creator, Frank Miller.

So after Daredevil gives T'Challa permission to be the new vigilante in town and then bugs off to wherever, Foggy Nelson helps set T'Challa up with a new identity. Under a goatee and pair of glasses, he is now Mr. Okonkwo, a Congolese immigrant who quickly finds a new gig as the manager of The Devil's Kitchen diner and a not-so-great apartment, the better to keep an eye on the neighborhood. Because he lacks Vibranium and his fancy gadgets, he basically fights crime as a sort of cape-less Batman or color-swapped Daredevil; wearing a bullet-proof vest over his togs and punching and kicking people. He occasionally busts out a gadget he made himself with equipment from the hardware store. Storm of the X-Men, who was still T'Challa's wife at this point, is limited mostly to Skype-ing with him, as he wants to go it alone as part of his proving-himself thing, and he's afraid if his storm goddess/queen/mutant superhero hangs around too much, his cover might be blown.

The six-part "Urban Jungle" features an escalating war between the new vigilante in town, The Panther--oddly, hardly anyone ever recognizes The Black Panther as The Black Panther, superhero, Avenger and former King of Wakanda, but just call him "Panther"--and a new would-be Kingpin of Crime in town, Vlad "The Impaler". It's low-level and low-stakes for a Black Panther comic, but then, scaling his world down from the world to a New York City neighborhood is part of the entire remit of the series. It's all-around super-solid superhero crime comics, with Luke Cage and Spider-Man both briefly dropping by only to be rebuffed (Palo draws the issue with Spider-Man in it, and he draws Panther a few heads taller and a few torsos wider than Spidey, giving them a nice physical representation of their attitudes in relation to one another).

That's followed immediately by the two-part, Palo-drawn "Storm Hunter," that follows on a dangling plot point from the previous arc. This issue pits T'Challa up against Kraven The Hunter, and he gets an unwelcome assist from his wife Storm.

Next is the Francavilla-drawn "Fear and Loathing In Hell's Kitchen," a Fear Itself tie-in of sorts...although one need not know much of anything about Fear Itself to follow the story, which features the rise of a new Hatemonger and the debut of "American Panther," a star-spangled, Panther-themed version of Black Panther to provide an America First answer to the foreign-born, immigrant hero, whose "accent" is referred to repeatedly. This three-issue arc actually reads incredibly uncomfortably in 2018, as the sorts of things The Hatemonger's followers say about immigrants sound way too familiar and, well, real today. At the time Liss was writing this story in 2011 or so, he was basically taking real attitudes of bigoted and/or racist and/or nationalist assholes and turning their words and actions up from, like, an 8 to an 11. Now that exaggerated-for-superhero-comics 11 is, like, part of the national discourse. If a guy showed up in a purple Klan hood with a big "H" on the forehead for "Hate" and demanded that immigrants return America to Americans in real life today, well, the actual president of the United States might say there were fine people on both sides of the argument, or that there were violence on both sides of the torch-wielding mob marching through New York (I guess the geography of the story is dependent on mind-control and the influence of a supernatural fear god, as it's difficult to imagine the events of Charlottesville in 2017 occurring in New York City, but still...)

Then there are two done-in-ones, a "Spider-Island" tie-in drawn by Francavilla (In which Panther has six arms and fights Overdrive and Lady Bullseye...Panther's extra arms being the only thing really making this a "Spider-Island" story) and a Palo-drawn "Point One" issue in which T'Challa fights The White Wolf again, this time getting an important assist from his waitress-turned-confidante Sofija.

Finally, there's "The Kingpin of Wakanda," drawn by Martinbrough, Oeming and Palo. This story arc is the Daredevil-iest of them all, in its villains if not its tone. Kingpin Wilson Fisk has taken over The Hand, and he makes a play for Wakanda. Faced with these foes and Kingpin's two top assassins--Lady Bullseye and Typhoid Mary--T'Challa finally accepts help from his fellow super-heroes Luke Cage and The Falcon, and even reaches out to allies in Wakanda.

Star Wars: Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi--Captain Phasma

Yes, that is actually the actual title of this comic book, at least according to the fine print on the title page. As you can see from the cover, the actual title looks like it might actually be a little different, but, well, whichever is the case, I think we can all agree that it features all of those words in one arrangement or another, and that "Star Wars" is in there one time too many.

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Delilah S. Dawson's Phasma novel and, as a result, know way more about the new trilogy's fascinating and mysterious character than I need to, or even want to. One thing that was particularly striking about Dawson's Phasma, which is for all intents and purposes a novel-length secret origin story for the character, is that she is constantly presented as the ultimate, undefeatable badass in it, but her relatively little screen time in Force Awakens and Last Jedi hardly matches up with her reputation from the book (In Force Awakens, she rolls over for a septuagenarian Han Solo and friends then lets them toss her down a garbage chute; in Last Jedi she's quickly defeated--and maybe even killed!--by a former subordinate after a few seconds of hand-to-hand combat). Of course, I soon realized that is generally the case with Star Wars bad guys in the expanded universe stuff: Boba Fett, General Grievous, even Darth Vader himself, all of them are infinitely more skilled, powerful and dangerous in comics, cartoons and novels than they are in the actual films, where they are generally blundering boobs that are almost ridiculously easy to take down by our heroes (Vader's appearance in Rogue One notwithstanding; that Vader seemed a lot more like the comic book Vader than the one from the original trilogy).

As for Phasma's first comic book miniseries, it echoes Dawson's novel in several ways that I found somewhat disappointing. The majority of the series takes place on a planet that is so similar to her home planet of Parnassos that it's weird that her comic book is set there at all--she does make reference to the fact that this planet reminds her "too much" of one she used to know--and there's even a brief flashback to her time spent there, including the namedropping of a character from the novel, but I couldn't quite make sense of it.

The relatively short story--it's only 80-pages long--is written by Marvel rising star Kelly Thompson and drawn by artist Marco Checchetto, with colors by Andres Mossa. It follows immediately from the climax of Force Awakens, beginning with her exit from the trash compactor and detailing how she spent the rest of the film's run-time, at one point rather comically walking past Kylo Ren and Rey as they light saber-fight in the snowy woods. She has her own, desperate mission to complete ASAP: To cover up the fact that she's the one that gave Han Solo and company access to Super Death Star Starkiller Base's computer systems and thus pretty much doomed The Empire The First Order's battle against The Rebel--er, The Resistance (See, I'm getting the hang of it!).

As only one person in the First Order knows she was the one who did so, a rando officer who checked the logs, she gives chase to him, eventually commandeering a TIE fighter, its pilot and its BB-8-esque droid to chase him to the Parnassos-like planet. There she and her partner navigate a sort of civil war between the humans living there and a race of aquatic beings who have captured her prey. Because she has to make sure he's dead herself, that means she first has to rescue him.

As I said, it's a pretty short, even slight story, one that reiterates something that is made extremely clear in Dawson's novel: Above all else, Phasma is a survivor, and a ruthless one at that, willing to sacrifice and kill anyone that threatens her survival. It is, however, the very definition of nothing special, which was something of a disappointment to me, based on how much I've liked the last few Thompson-written comics I've read.

Chechetto's artwork is similarly just okay, about on par with the level of quality and general visual style of the bulk of Marvel's Star Wars comics. The pages are very photo reference-y, perhaps unsurprising given how many costume and vehicles are being visually cut and pasted from the film into a comic book spin-off, and so aside from a few different creatures--humanoid and monstrous--living on the planet Phasma hunts her prey on, he's not called on to come up with much that's new or different from what we've seen in Force Awakens anyway.

Phasma's shiny chrome armor doesn't really seem to pop in the over-colored artwork, either. Again, it looks to be consistent with the bulk of Marvel's Star Wars comics, but the result of all the different lights reflecting off of Phasma is that she sometimes just look transparent, or else just badly colored white, rather than shiny and polished, which loses her most striking visual identifier. I can't help but wonder how much better this comic might have looked--although perhaps I'm just speaking from my own personal aesthetic preferences here--were it drawn by Elsa Charretier, who was drawing Marvel's Unstoppable Wasp, and has been doing some truly superlative work on IDW's Star Wars comics. In general, I think Phasma's look would be better served by something that looks more drawn than photographic.