Month: November 2024

Following on from the first volume, this was a little better in that it told a far more straightforward story. The flashbacks are still there, during which time we get to have some background on Valance in a similar way to how we got some background on Zahra in the second volume of the ongoing series. 

The main storyline, though, involves Valance and his charge, Cadeliah, as the bounty hunter tracks down his old flame Yura on the planet Lowik. Since Valance left to join the Empire, Yura has become a part of the Rebel Alliance, and Lowik has a secret base there. When Valance is attacked by Zuckuss and 4-LOM, he and Cadeliah head to Lowik in an effort to keep her safe. The bounty hunter duo track him there, however, so Valance is forced to strike a deal to keep them off his trail. Valance then surfaces in a number of faraway ports in an attempt to shake the trail from Yura, however he is called in to help by the Rebels when one of their ships goes missing. Knowing they can’t communicate due to the Empire having cracked their code, they engage Valance on a rescue mission, however the whole situation is a setup. The Rebel commander of the ship, Hill Purpura, had struck a deal with Dengar, an old swoop racing partner from back in the day, to sell information in exchange for getting him away from the Alliance. 

Dengar, who had been captured by the Ohnaka gang after he had been caught cheating at sabacc, double crosses the Weequays but Purpura’s Rebel colleagues fight back, forcing Valance and Dengar to flee. When Dengar tells Valance about Boba Fett having captured Han Solo, Valance feels a surge of conscience and teams up with Dengar to steal the carbonite slab, as he feels he owes Solo for having saved his life years ago in the Imperial Academy.

I thought this book was a step up from the first volume, though it continues the story so they’re kinda necessary to read in tandem. We get the obligatory backstory on Valance, though I’m not entirely sure why he feels like he owes Han so much – up to this point, I had thought that Valance was The Baddest of Men, but here we see a very different side. The inclusion of the Rebel Alliance thread was interesting in how it fit in with his background, and I wonder if the intention here is to draw comparison to the kind of life that Han could have had, if he hadn’t felt that call to the light?

The Alliance plot thread is also interesting for showing how different the rebels could be. When faced with the setbacks they had after Hoth, there are still idealists (zealots?) and then there are the pragmatists, falling back on any connections they can to get out of a difficult situation.

The inclusion of the Ohnaka gang here is interesting, though Hondo himself clearly is no longer in charge. I really appreciate seeing more of Dengar though – indeed, so far we’ve got to spend time with most of the bounty hunters that answer Vader’s call, just waiting on IG-88 to make an appearance now. Throughout, though, it’s been fascinating to see how much of the EU/Legends backstory for these guys has been preserved. Dengar was still a swoop racer; Zuckuss still refers to himself in the third person, and still possesses his intuition. Even 4-LOM still loves shiny jewels.

Towards the end, there’s a bit of a filler story featuring Bossk on a hunt on Malastare, nothing too exciting, but he still worships the Scorekeeper too. Interesting to see, anyway!

Picking up from the last volume, we first have a couple of issues that deal with essentially the backstory of Commander Zehra, as she was hand-picked by Tarkin as his protégé, before failing to carry out his orders to the letter when she was sent to eliminate a crime boss. She had barely left the Death Star to make things right when Luke blew the station, and so was deprived the chance of redemption. Holding Leia responsible, she has now pursued the Princess to a rendezvous point, where she almost jeopardises their mission – which was given to her personally by Vader – to hunt and destroy the Rebels, in favour of going after Leia on her own.

Despite Zahra’s efforts, Leia and the gang are able to get away, though the encounter with Zahra evidently haunts Leia for a while. At any rate, the Rebels launch their Operation Starlight in an attempt to strike back at the Empire after the grievous beating they suffered at Hoth, but it isn’t clear how to get around the problem of the Empire having broken their codes. C-3PO comes up with the idea of using an ancient language to base the cipher off, the only problem being the language is considered dead, and is not in any modern protocol droid’s lexicon. There is a translation droid in a museum on Coruscant which knows it, though, so Kes Dameron and his Pathfinders head to the galactic capital, with Lando and Lobot in tow, to recover the relic.

Once back at the fleet, the droid is initially hostile but Lobot is able to pacify its mind for long enough to allow the Rebels to enact their plan. However, the droid soon learns that he can affect Lobot through the connection in the same way Lobot can affect him. Meanwhile, Starlight Squadron is formed, led by Dameron’s partner Shara Bey, to head to each of the established fallback points for the Rebels and find any surviving cells to give them the new encryption. Unfortunately, the Imperials had got there first, and the squadron is attacked by buzz droids. 

Keeping the droid steady takes its toll on Lobot, and Lando is thrown into the brig for attempting to protect his friend. Meanwhile, Starlight Squadron is ambushed by Zahra’s task force, and the Imperials attempt to tractor them in for interrogation. Thanks to Wedge, the group is able to destroy the tractor beam emplacements and escape with some Imperial droids, though Shara is believed to have fallen in the battle. Threepio is able to simulate enough of the language and the code derived from it to render the older droid unnecessary, but Lando is now certain the Rebels have no interest in him or Lobot, and so they decide to give the droid to Bib Fortuna to keep Jabba happy.

The second volume felt a bit… all over the place, if I’m honest. I did like the backstory to Commander Zahra, even if it does follow similar beats to Daala’s backstory – I suppose I quite enjoy seeing how characters from Legends have been used to create new ones in Canon. There are some very interesting ties back to the Tarkin novel in this one, and further ties to the High Republic series with the criminal Zahra is tasked with bringing down. All in all, that part was good.

The main meat of the volume, though, is a little odd. We start off with the hare-brained scheme to break into a museum on Coruscant to recover an ancient droid who is the only known surviving model that can speak a dead language, which the Rebels hope to use as the basis for a new code. Getting that code to their other cells seems to be hand-waved away somewhat at first, and we end up with the Pathfinders on a mission that manages to incorporate real-world arguments against museums and cultural appropriation.

Next, with the code synthesised, a new squadron is formed under Shara Bey (not Wedge, who I think is the more experienced pilot at this point) to try to find their comrades and hand out the new code. The Empire has somehow got there first, and everyone says “it’s a trap!” But how? The Rebels went off in the hope they might find cells at their pre-established fallback points, that’s not a trap! Bah. I’m also a bit irritated because we know Shara makes it out alive, as she is in the post-Jedi Shattered Empire comic. 

The one interesting part of the second half of this volume is how Lando and Lobot are treated by the Rebels, and I think it’s interesting to see the Rebellion from the point of view of Lando, an outsider. The rest of them are all willing to give up their lives for the cause, and they don’t think anything of reducing Lobot to a brain-dead mush, if it means that Shara’s squadron is able to complete their mission. It’s really quite an interesting point, and I’m pleased to see that the thread from the last volume hasn’t been abandoned here. Almost overnight with book two, Lando has become the more interesting character in this entire time period, because I’m really interested in how he is going to go from his current point, where he is definitely not a fan of how he and Lobot have been treated, to taking on the mantle of General and leading the assault on the second Death Star.

So, not the best one so far, but I think there are some interesting story points here that have grabbed my attention, for sure.

Volume three is part of the War of the Bounty Hunters crossover series, so that will be along in due course…

The first volume of the Star Wars ongoing series kicks off shortly after Leia has rescued Luke from the weather vane underneath Cloud City, as they are escaping from the pursuing TIE fighters and heading to their rendezvous point. The story gives us a bit of a side adventure as the team arrives in the Mid Rim only to find the Rebels under attack by the Tarkin’s Will star destroyer, led by Commander Zahra. She is a new Imperial commander here, though there is evidently some history that she has, both seemingly with Tarkin himself, and also with the Rebels. The Falcon is able to cause enough damage for some of the Rebels to escape, but we soon learn that Zahra has developed some kind of tracing device that allows her to track Rebel comms, and zero-in on their location using their encryption. The Rebels also realise this, and the feeling is that their individual cells are now isolated in the wake of Hoth.

After Luke has had his new hand, the team attempts to come up with a rescue plan for Han, and Lando suggests meeting up with some of his contacts on Tatooine to find out if Boba Fett has delivered his bounty yet. He narrowly avoids being thrown to Jabba’s rancor, only saving himself by offering to provide intel on the Rebellion. Next, Lando persuades Luke to suggest a mission to Cloud City to retrieve his lightsaber, while Lando clearly has his own reasons for returning there. As it turns out, they all go, and while Luke is unsuccessful, he has a vision through the Force of a hooded woman giving him a new lightsaber. Meanwhile, Leia attempts to learn more about the carbon freezing process so that she will be able to defrost Han when the time comes, but is captured by the Imperials and frozen herself. Lando finds his aide Lobot, who has been directly hooked up to the central computer, and after ordering Lobot to start releasing the waste gases from the tibanna refineries, effectively poisoning the product, the two make their escape. Luke is able to release all of the undesirables the Empire had carbon frozen, and they all make their escape, Leia having scored a few more recruits to the Rebellion.

Luke heads off on his mission to find the woman in his vision, arriving on Serelia but being trapped there by her. She introduces herself as Verla, once a Jedi trainee who managed to escape Order 66 and has been in hiding ever since. She provides Luke with some background to things like the Inquisitorius, and senses he is the son of Anakin Skywalker. She nearly drowns him, but Artoo is able to come to the rescue. In exchange for being left alone, she tells him of an old temple on the world of Tempes. Luke heads off, and finds a new lightsaber but is forced to fight the ghost of the Grand Inquisitor in order to claim it. Vader, sensing the trap he had set a long time ago has been sprung, arrives too late to find Luke. 

There’s a lot going on in this book, and it is action-packed pretty much from the off. I really liked the artwork, I have to say, and it was interesting to see a number of callbacks to earlier media, particularly the ghost of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s something I had been aware of, but wasn’t entirely aware that it was in this book. Seems like the sort of thing Vader would do, anyway! Vader seems to drift in and out of the picture in this book, anyway, I think it is somewhat entwined with the first volume of Greg Pak’s series that I read over the summer.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Verla giving Luke the info-dump about Order 66, principally because I had always thought the identity of Darth Vader as Anakin Skywalker was supposed to have been a mystery. The idea, as I understood it, was that Vader was meant to have been some hugely powerful enforcer who had just appeared from nowhere, and was able to hunt down and slaughter Jedi with ease. Maybe the fact that Verla is able to sense Luke’s parentage means she was able to sense Vader’s identity? It somehow robbed the mystique, I thought, so I wasn’t a big fan of that.

The other big callback to the past is one that I hadn’t seen coming, as the Rebels make reference to Starlight Beacon from the High Republic series. It makes sense, because Light of the Jedi (also by Soule) takes place something like 230 years before the events of A New Hope, so it would be like people now referencing the French Revolution, for example. It’s a known piece of history.

Lando has a lot to do in this book, and I quite like the fact that he’s clearly running with his own agenda. I think a lot of things from the old EU make it seem like he immediately throws in his lot with the Rebellion out of remorse for selling Han out, but I think this portrayal definitely seems more in-keeping with the more self-serving Lando that we first meet in Empire. I do wonder what he and Lobot will be up to in the next book, and how the whole thing with Jabba is going to work itself out. 

Overall, this was  really enjoyable start to the new ongoing series. I hope we don’t have any of the silly elements that were part of the first ongoing series, set after A New Hope, but I get the impression that this time around, we’re going to see perhaps a bit more seriousness. We’ve got an interesting villain in Commander Zahra, who seems to be potentially a new canon version of Admiral Daala. It’s all shaping up to be quite an interesting series so far, anyway!