Marvel

Marvel Star Wars: the 2020 run (finale)

Hey everybody,
If you’ve been with me since December, you’ll know that I’ve been working my way through the 2020 series of Star Wars comics from Marvel. This encompasses four series – the main ongoing series (by Charles Soule), Darth Vader (by Greg Pak), Bounty Hunters (by Ethan Sacks) and Doctor Aphra (by Alyssa Wong). The ongoing series and the Vader series each run to 50 issues, while Bounty Hunters closed at 42, and Aphra ended with 40. Along the way, there were four crossover events, with a main book all written by Charles Soule, but all four series were also involved in each of these events. The overarching narrative was of the return of Qi’ra and the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate, although that came and went as a trilogy, with the Dark Droids event forming the last crossover. With the Dark Droids series, we also saw the conclusion of both the Bounty Hunters and Doctor Aphra, so all that’s left now is two books for the ongoing series, and two for Darth Vader.

The Sith and the Skywalker is the penultimate book of the ongoing series, and I feel is quite erroneously named. It collects a two-part series that features Luke in his quest to purify the red kyber crystal he gained on Cristophsis, when he met the Fallanassi Gretta. He goes back to her for help, and together with her Auntie Feez they guide him through the meditation, after which the crystal emerges white.

The main meat of the book, though, is The Trial of Lando Calrissian, after his admission during the Dark Droids crossover that he stole the droid responsible for creating the new Alliance code. During the trial, Mon Mothma is abducted by a gang who demand a ransom for her, but as it happens Lando knows the gang, so gets Chewie to check through a list of known locations where they could be holding her. Lando is able to rescue Mon Mothma, though General Madine is all for pushing him through an airlock for treason. Of course, Lando gets off with essentially a massive fine to help the Rebel cause, but it was definitely one of the better storylines that I’ve read so far in this series, not least for Lando’s speech in his own defence.

The Rise of the Schism Imperial picks up from the end of the Vader instalment of Dark Droids, where Sly Moore has essentially been collecting disenfranchised Imperials with a beef against Vader, though who hold the Emperor accountable. These Imperials are part of Sly Moore’s “Schism”, and work together with Vader – and his newly-abducted Rebel super-soldiers – to consolidate his power base. The book culminates with Vader’s raid on Exegol, during which he kills a massive monster and steals a huge kyber crystal, via which he communicates with the Emperor, who finally lets him pursue Luke. It’s all very weird, I have to say, and while I have been trying to enjoy the Vader book, it’s definitely been very patchy of late. The whole thing with the Rebel super-soldiers was almost unbelievable, but the constant Vader vs the Emperor, and trying to establish a power base of his own, has been all over the place in this series. The one bright spot on the horizon is that the book ends with Sabé getting in touch with Luke…

The Vader run ends with volume ten, Phantoms, and we find out that Sabé wanted to test Luke to see if he had the same darkness within him that Vader does. Meanwhile, Sly Moore tips her hand when the Rebel super-soldiers manage to incapacitate Vader, and she reveals that she wishes to take Vader’s place at the Emperor’s side, so tracks down Luke to try to kill him. Vader manages to convince the super-soldiers that Luke, their hero, is in danger, and somehow they believe him, so everyone goes to the same planet, and obviously Luke makes it off alive. All of this has been yet another test from the Emperor though, and Sly Moore is still in his good graces while Vader resumes his place as the Emperor’s apprentice. There’s a bit of a montage of endings then, and among other things we get to see Sabé meet with Leia and offer her the chance to rule at Vader’s side, before she realises that Leia too is pure of heart and so leaves her to it. This was, if anything, an infuriating bit because of how short it was. In the Legends continuity, Sabé actually accompanied Leia to Alderaan and served as her weapons trainer, and I think there was an intent that Sabé was meant to be the reason why Leia believes she could still recall her mother’s face, etc. Here, though, Leia angrily recognises Sabé as a lieutenant of Vader, and also completely dismisses her idea of ruling the galaxy, then it’s over.

While I wanted to like the book, I felt that ultimately it didn’t go where I had perhaps wanted it to, as I thought we could have had some far more interesting scenes with Sabé and both Luke and Leia. Interestingly, though, Luke recognises the former handmaiden though I believe this was their first canon meeting…

The ongoing series then comes to a close with volume nine, The Path of Light. This is basically a two-part story that involves Leia and Luke investigating the disappearance of the Alderaan survivors’ fleet, along with Evaan Verlaine who returns after a bit of a gap. Evaan was first seen in the Princess Leia miniseries from 2015, and has since been retconned as Gold Three, who flew in the Battle of Scarif and was the lone returning Y-Wing from the first Death Star assault (replacing Keyan Farlander). I quite like her character, as she has hints of Deena Shan as well as Winter, although I think Amilyn Holdo has now more fully taken over the mantle of Winter. Anyway, the three of them fly to the last known location of the Survivors’ fleet, and it soon becomes clear that they have landed in a trap – laid by none other than Commander Zahra! Yes, she didn’t die way back in issue 26, but instead managed to get free, and traded her tactical expertise to some raiders in return for medical attention. She’s been leading them ever since, and has been determined to exact vengeance on Leia. Luke is able to see her off, and she escapes only to attempt to fly her starfighter directly at Leia, but a Mon Cal cruiser arrives and shoots her down. After the mission, Evaan receives a message from the Alderaanians saying they have decided to disperse and live their lives, which initially upsets Leia as she feels the final bastion of her people has gone, but eventually she is encouraged by the fact that life is moving on. As such, she determines to go rescue Han.

Issue 50 of the ongoing series is a bit of an outlier, as we jump forward in time and Luke is training Ben Solo on Ossus, and he tells him a story of the time when he was part of a team to assassinate Palpatine. There’s a Dark Side doohickey that needs some genetic material of the target, at which point it will do Dark Side stuff to “find” them, and kills not just that person, but everyone who they have ever been in contact with. Realising the billions of people the Emperor has been in contact with, they decide not to go through with it, but Chewie is determined to get revenge for Kashyyyk’s enslavement, and so the team give it different genetic material from a person long-dead to essentially turn the thing off. The story is meant as a lesson for Ben, but really, it was a fairly poor way to end the ongoing series.

Indeed, I think this mostly sums up my thoughts on the entire 40-odd books that I’ve been reading for the last 7 weeks! Let’s look at them in turn…

Doctor Aphra is mostly Aphra causing chaos, being a terrible person that we are presumably meant to cheer on or something. There were some interesting ideas as we wafted by the criminal underbelly of Canto Bight, but ultimately this was the series that I just did not enjoy. I guess I just don’t see how a “rogue archaeologist” could be wound up so closely with the big characters from the movies. It kinda made sense when Vader was initially looking to build a droid army to consolidate his power base in the initial 2015 run, and needed someone who could not only reprogram these droids, but also do the archaeology bit as well. But that initial premise has since been stretched so paper-thin that it’s now beyond irritating. I know there was another run that has been cancelled after a dozen issues or something, but until she has something better to offer, I just hope Aphra gets retired.

The Bounty Hunters was initially very confusing but, as time went on, I think I got into it somewhat. It was very much tied into the crossovers, as we’re dealing with the galactic underworld during the time of Crimson Dawn and the syndicate wars, but it was interesting to get to spend some more time with those hunters from the bridge of the Executor. There was some promise along the way, when we saw Inferno Squad deployed to take out Valance, but ultimately I think this one was only marginally better than the Aphra run.

The ongoing series felt very good to start with, as we were dealing with the fallout from the Battle of Hoth and the fact that the Alliance fleet had scattered, but couldn’t regroup due to the fact that their code had been cracked. Unfortunately, this plot point was hastily solved to make way for the series of crossovers, and so we’ve ended up with a series of throwaway adventures on the whole. The idea of Luke needing to search out more Jedi lore is a bit weird as it had me asking “why doesn’t he just go back to Yoda?” There’s an attempt to hand-wave this as “Yoda isn’t answering my Force-call” or somesuch, but really, I think the biggest problem we have here is that tradition dictates there is a year between Empire and Jedi, and for that entire year, the Rebels are just dithering about, not really making any move to rescue Han, and Luke makes no attempt to return to Yoda. It makes me wonder whether George initially had planned for only a couple of weeks to elapse between the two films, because it really stretches the imagination.

Finally, the Darth Vader series started out so strong. Indeed, it was reading this book that got me back into the Marvel comics as a whole, because I had mainly checked out back in 2016 or 2017 when they were getting a bit too silly. The idea of Sabé leading a pro-Naboo faction that was determined to have justice for Padmé was just awesome in my mind, and the push and pull there was very interesting. As time went on, though, and we had all the crossovers, I think the Sabé storyline got a bit lost, and the constant power struggle between Vader and the Emperor went on perhaps a bit too long. There’s definitely some good stories in here, and I like the inclusion of the likes of Sly Moore and Ochi of Bestoon, but I do believe if Greg Pak had been given more freedom to create his story, rather than “you need to hit these four crossover points” (and, quite possibly, “you need to tie into Exegol and stuff”), we could have had something more interesting.

Aside from the Amidalans, I also really enjoyed the fact that Kitster and the other slave children make an appearance, and one of the pseudo-endings in the tenth book involves Kitster and Wald returning to Tatooine and freeing their former slave-friends, so that we have the whole gang of kids from Episode I reunited, reminiscing about their childhoods and wondering what happened to Anakin. I thought this was actually pretty perfect, as you can just imagine it’s the sort of thing that kids brought up in hardship would be like.

Out of all of these books, I think I would probably re-read the Vader run, but do it by itself rather than peppering in all of the others. I might return to the ongoing series one of these days as well, because I feel that my summary just now might be doing it a disservice, though the fact that nothing really stands out for me beyond Lando’s defence speech during his trial is perhaps telling…

At any rate, this post has gone on long enough now, so I’ll stop my rambling nonsense!

Epiphany!

Last year on Epiphany, I ran through a few of the games that I’d been able to get to the table, and also briefly mentioned the first volume in the Uncanny X-Force series that I had picked up, The Apocalypse Solution. Over the course of that month, I actually read the first two books in the series, but came up against the brick wall of volume 3 being very expensive. Well, what a difference a year makes, as I’ve now been able to pick up not only volume 3, but also volume 4!

It’s the two-part Dark Angel Saga, presumably a riff on the Dark Phoenix Saga, though from my scant knowledge of Marvel Crisis Protocol, I think this is something to do with the fact they killed baby-Apocalypse in the first book.

Once I’ve finished my trawl through the 2020 Star Wars comics, I’m going to move on to these and catch up with everything, before then making a start on the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. So that’s my reading plans taken care of until, oh, probably Easter…

Movie night: Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Hey everybody,
Since August, I’ve been working my way through the MCU movies once again, and after a couple of months of rewatching stuff we’ve seen plenty of times, we’ve finally made it to something “new” – Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I say “new”, it’s actually four years old at the time I’m writing this. I think we tried to watch it a couple of years back, but as the movie starts with a lot of subtitled Chinese dialogue, we panicked and moved on! Fortunately, though, it was only the first few minutes that are like this.

The movie begins a thousand years ago with Xu Wenwu discovering the mystical ten rings that give him god-like powers and grant him immortality. Becoming a powerful conqueror, he forms the Ten Rings organisation, and his influence is felt throughout the centuries. Fast forward to 1996, Wenwu determines to find the mythical village of Ta Lo, but in his journey he instead meets the guardian Ying Li, who bests him in combat and the two eventually fall in love. They marry and have two children, Shang-Chi and Xialing, and Wenwu locks away the rings.

Years pass, and the Iron Gang, rivals of Wenwu, catch up with the family and murder Li. Wenwu reforms the Ten Rings and trains his children in martial arts as he seeks revenge. When Shang Chi is 14, he is sent on a mission by his father to assassinate the head of the Iron Gang, but the mission scars him and he runs away to San Francisco.

In the present day, Shang Chi is attacked by members of the Ten Rings as they are after a pendant given to him by his mother. Fearing they may also go after his sister, Shang Chi and his friend Katy travel to Macau, where they discover Xialing is head of an underground fight club, but the Ten Rings catch them both and take them to Wenwu. Their father reveals that he has been hearing the voice of their mother Li, asking for help as if she is trapped, and is more determined than ever to find Ta Lo. Using the pendants from both his children, he is able to find the entrance. When Wenwu reveals he plans to destroy the village to free his wife, Shang Chi and Xialing decide to escape to find the village first and warn them.

Wenwu and the Ten Rings arrive, and there’s a pitched battle while Wenwu follows the voice he believes is Li asking for help. Turns out it’s a massive dragon, the Dweller-in-Darkness, held at bay behind a magically-sealed gate, and when Wenwu attacks the gate some of the demon “soul-eaters” escape and cause havoc. The Ten Rings join forces with the villagers to beat back the onslaught, while Shang Chi and his father fight. Wenwu eventually seems to come to his senses and sacrifices himself to save his son, bequeathing the rings to him as he dies.

Shang Chi is then contacted by Wong and brought to Kamar-Taj so that they can study the composition of the rings. It seems that the rings are acting as a beacon for something, causing Captain Marvel and Bruce Banner some disquiet. At the end of the credits, Xialing is shown as the new head of the Ten Rings, after having promised to disband the group.

That’s a really long synopsis, but all things considered, I really liked this movie. I’m not sure if part of that may stem from the fact that I’d tried to watch it and cried off after so many subtitles back in the day, or whether it was just so far removed from what I thought it was going to be. There’s so much to enjoy about this film though, with some amazing martial arts scenes as I suppose you would expect. The Ta Lo stuff is very weird, I have to say, but the end result is just more other-worldly than anything else.

Ben Kingsley is back as the Mandarin stooge, Trevor Slattery, and once again puts in a pretty decent performance. We get some background that tells us Wenwu was behind the whole thing with Iron Man way back in the very first movie, which is very interesting as of course there was plenty of Ten Rings iconography in that film. I suppose you can’t really do a comics-accurate Mandarin nowadays, but overall the way this was handled was, I think, pretty good. Of course, there was outrage back when Iron Man 3 was out and it “wasn’t the real Mandarin”, but that is, I think, okay.

Overall, anyway, I did enjoy this one. I don’t think there’s much negative to say about it – perhaps the only thing that somewhat bothers me is how Shang Chi as a character has basically been ignored by the wider MCU since this film came out in 2021. I assume he’s coming back in some of the ensemble movies coming out as Phase 6 gets underway, but honestly, it feels like this film is pretty much a standalone thing, which isn’t of course a bad thing, but when it comes out as part of an ongoing storyline, the fact that he hasn’t appeared since does start to feel a bit weird…

Fantastic Four: First Steps

At the weekend, we shipped the kids off to the in-laws and took the rare opportunity for a date night, having chicken and then watching the new Fantastic Four movie. I’ve read this is the 37th movie in the MCU, which just boggles my mind; it kicks off Phase Six, which I believe is the final Phase of projects that have been announced, and has me wondering just what’s next once it all ends in a couple more years…

Anyway!

I really like how this film approaches the idea of a reboot, as we start 4 years after that fateful trip into space when Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben got blasted by cosmic radiation that granted them powers. To introduce the team to the audience, then, we have a talk show doing a retrospective on them, and we get the whole history in about ten minutes.

When Sue discovers that she’s pregnant, Reed goes into overdrive trying to protect New York, and we get a load of name-drops of FanFour villains including Puppet Master, which I also liked. However, a bizarre cosmic event sees the Silver Surfer arrive to herald the destruction of Earth by Galactus. The team launch into space to gather intel and work out a response, and find Galactus as he’s feeding on another planet. We learn that Galactus is kinda cursed with the need to consume life-sustaining worlds, but Sue’s unborn baby is his salvation as it will inherit this curse. The team is able to escape as Sue goes into labour, with baby Franklin being born during the return to Earth.

The inhabitants of New York think that they have defeated Galactus, but Reed tells them they were not able to, and goes on to explain that Galactus wanted Franklin. The public mood turns against the Four when they realise that the danger is coming, but Reed is able to come up with a plan to teleport Earth away from Galactus.

The plan almost works, until the Surfer returns and destroys the teleport devices save one in Times Square. A new plan is developed, with the team luring Galactus to the surface with Franklin as the bait. It almost works, but Galactus realises the deception and goes to the Baxter Building and takes him. Sue is not having that though, and uses her powers to force Galactus through the portal, seemingly at the cost of her life. However, Franklin is somehow able to restore her to life, and everything ends well.

Four years later, Sue is reading to Franklin in their apartment. When she gets up to get a different book, she comes back to find him interacting with a guy in a green cloak, holding a metal mask…

I really liked this movie. It’s effectively a stand-alone film, as it’s set on Earth-828 in 1964, a separate reality from the normal Earth-616, and with a retro-futuristic look that is meant to evoke the positivity of the kind of space-age 60s. It’s distinct from the 60s we had in X-Men First Class, which was a more realistic (for our timeline) feel. It still feels like the 60s, and the costumes of the team look like the comics originals for the most part, but in general it has that kind of 60s-futurist look that I kinda love.

Galactus as the villain feels like starting off big, but I think it was done pretty well. They didn’t kill him off, which I like, but merely pushed him (they think) to the far corners of the universe. I say that, because I wonder if they may instead have pushed him into the 616 timeline or something…

At the moment, it’s unclear how they’ll factor into the wider MCU, but given that next year’s Avengers Doomsday movie is going to include them, I assume they’ll somehow be pulled into things to deal with Victor von Doom, who of course makes that cameo appearance in the mid-credits scene. He also appears to have his eye on Franklin, which is worrying!

There’s definitely more to say on this movie, and I’m kinda tempted to try and see it again… When the original Fox movie came out in 2005, I became a bit of a fan of Marvel’s First Family, and read a lot of the comics before the whole thing with Marvel and Fox blew up. But suffice it to say, I’m very excited to see them back on the big screen! Apparently there’s a sequel in the works in addition to their crossover movies, so here’s hoping we’ll get more in the years to come!

Back to MCP!

Hey everybody,
Last weekend, James and I made a triumphant return to playing Marvel Crisis Protocol, after an almost 4 month hiatus from the game, and it was excellent! I haven’t really done anything with the game in that time; in terms of minis, I had almost entirely been focused on Shatterpoint. However, I think it had been sneaking back into both our plans for some time, and after playing a lot of Star Wars, it was great to be in Marvel, chucking terrain left and right!

Atomic Mass had published their character updates back in May, though neither of us had read through the document until a few days before the game. I had built a sort of weird list, which I wanted to talk about here, but it turned out that there had been a fairly substantial change to one of the characters, which made for a very fun game, indeed!

Doctor Strange originally had a leadership ability for Defenders that allowed allies to pay 1 power to choose what type of attack they were making, then if it dealt damage, the target gained the Hex condition. Hex means the character cannot explode crits under any circumstance, so it’s fairly good defensively because they won’t be increasing their successes. Anyway, the fact that you had to pay to use the leadership ability seemed to leave him behind, especially as he is a 5-threat character so he’s quite the investment! He has had quite the change though, so now once you have either dealt damage to an enemy, or you simply targeted a 5-threat enemy with the attack, you can give them Hex. It’s very good, and going up against She-Hulk and Cosmic Carol, they were both pretty much kept Hexed for the entire game…

We played two games, the first one under Strange I lost, but it was a lot of fun. The second one, under OG Captain America, I won – though that was more because of the rest of the team than Steve giving discounts to superpowers!

Let’s talk about the list, though.

It’s called Living Weapons, and is built around two 4-threat characters who I very much enjoy playing, Psylocke and Shang Chi. Now, you might be thinking, why am I building around two characters who are (a) not leaders, and (b) don’t have any affiliations in common? Well, the answer to that is simply that I like the characters very much!

Shang Chi is affiliated with Avengers and Defenders, and I had already determined that I wanted to include as many of my favourite characters (for maximum fun) as possible. So I had Doctor Strange, of course, but when it came to Avengers, I thought I’d use Captain America as I hadn’t really played him before. I think he’s hit the table once in a Cabal list, of all things. But there’s my Avengers and Defenders leaders, anyway! I also picked Daredevil, because he’s a Defenders leader, but is also something of a living weapon as well. Wolverine was included for similar reasons, though his cross-pollination of affiliations with Avengers, Defenders and X-Force opened up the idea of using Cable, who is the X-Force leader but also affiliated with Avengers. So I began to see the matrix! Sunspot came along because I love the model, and he’s also X-Force, then rounding out the list I have Ancient One (another living weapon) and Clea, because she has had quite the glow-up in the character update, and paired with her husband she can give him +2 dice on his attacks, and give out Judgment as well as Hex.

The idea, though, is to always be playing Psylocke and Shang Chi, so I would most often be playing Defenders or Avengers, and Psylocke would be considered a splash. However, Wolverine and Cable are around to tip the balance to X-Force if need be.

In theory, this was perhaps the most exciting list I have built to date. In practice, however, having 8 threat with no affiliation or leadership as a base is such a bad idea, that in the first game with Doctor Strange and Daredevil, I was playing a point down, but in both lists, I was only playing 4 models, which feels incredibly exposing to me.

It’s a fun list, and I think I’ll keep it in mind for the future, but I don’t think I’ll be breaking it out too much… Next up, I’m intending to play some Criminal Syndicate. Back in February, I picked up The Wrecking Crew as a project to kick-start this idea, but since I’ve not really been doing anything with MCP I haven’t really got them finished. That’ll need to change I think!

Fantastic Four trailer

I kinda like the look of this one.

I do enjoy the sort of ‘period pieces’, like X-Men First Class, so I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a good movie in the same mould. I mean, it seems to be really leaning hard into the camp 60s tone of the early comics, so how that will turn out is anyone’s guess, I suppose!

It’s interesting to know the film apparently takes place after the four have gained their powers, so I’m assuming we’ll get some kind of flashback stuff, but also Franklin Richards is a baby in the trailer, so it seems like we’re really getting set up for the future. I haven’t read too much else around the film, but given the commitment to making the four a big deal going forward in the MCU, I wonder how that’ll happen if there’s a 60+ year time jump to deal with…

At any rate, I’m kinda excited by this movie…

Another Marvel catch-up

Hey everybody,
Continuing from my Easter re-read of the Darth Vader (2015) series, I’ve recently been re-reading the Doctor Aphra (2016) series, having made some efforts to collect up those issues that I was missing from years gone by. Doctor Aphra was introduced in the Vader series as a “rogue archaeologist”, and for a very long time I found her to be such an irritating character, with all the wise-cracks and stuff that seemed to browbeat me into “you need to like this character!” The fact that she proclaims herself to be a Vader fangirl seemed to be a huge non-sequitur, as I’d always been under the impression that Vader was very much the last thing most people saw, and in general his existence and activities were not public knowledge. Also, the murder droids, Triple Zero and Beetee, being used as comic relief but in a really dark kind of way was very jarring. But over time, I suppose they’ve not exactly grown on me, but certainly I’ve learned to tolerate them.

The first arc of the Doctor Aphra series, Aphra, sees her reunited with her estranged father, who has called her doctorate into question as a means of manipulating her to help him with his life’s work, rediscovering the Ordu Aspectu, a Jedi sect. The trip takes them to a post-battle Yavin IV, where the Imperials then follow them to the Aspectu citadel, and the recovery of a crystal artifact that contains the memories of a long-dead Jedi, much like a holocron. Aphra seemingly secures it in a vault, but in actual fact plans to sell the real crystal for an Enormous Profit, the second arc of the series. In between these two comes The Screaming Citadel crossover with the main Star Wars ongoing series. Basically, Aphra and Luke head off to get a bored vampire lady to reactivate the crystal for Aphra to sell, and she uses Luke as bait to gain entry to the vampire’s castle. Very weird, and pretty silly stuff.

The Enormous Profit then has Aphra holding a silent auction for the crystal, but the droid sidekicks are bored, so alert Vader to the fact that a powerful Jedi artifact is up for sale. Vader isn’t aware that Aphra survived the earlier series, and she is able to evade him and still make it through with a profit, but Vader recovers the crystal and takes it to the Emperor on Coruscant.

The third arc, Remastered, is really where the series begins to take off, for me. This is one that I re-read earlier this year (under the impression that I hadn’t actually read it before). The two droids agreed to help Aphra escape her auction-gone-wrong in exchange for removing the inhibitor programming that prevented them from turning on her as their master. Naturally, Triple Zero decides the best thing to do is to take over a criminal organization, and Aphra ends up working for him on a job to recover his early memories from a Techno Union facility. Unfortunately, following the Clone Wars, all the data was transferred to a facility in deep space under Tarkin’s supervision, so Aphra is forced to lead a suicide-mission to break in and get the data the droids want. Along the way, we run into Magna Tolvan, formerly Captain and now Lieutenant, who forms a love interest for Aphra.

These first three arcs are extremely uneven, but we do have some very interesting stuff, such as the Imperial clean-up on Yavin IV, and the fighter pilot training school that Hera Syndulla runs out of an old abandoned Trade Federation freighter. Remastered is definitely the best of the bunch here, and not just because we get to see Aphra making mistakes and getting things wrong. Her character does seem to have been toned down a bit, though, but we still have the core of what she is, and it was reading this storyline in particular that really changed my mind on her. As it is, I’ve now picked up the rest of her ongoing series in trade paperback form, and while I was initially thinking I would only collect the ongoing series and the Vader series from the 2020 relaunch, I’ve also now been collecting her second volume.

Anyway. Among the other bits and pieces that I’ve picked up is the final issue in the Mutiny on Mon Cala arc of the main Star Wars ongoing series. This is one that I had five of the six issues for, so I was chuffed to complete this – until, that is, I made the time to actually read it.

The story premise is that Leia, Luke and Han are on Mon Cala (which used to be called Dac, which was previously called Mon Calamari), to bring the Mon Cala people into the Alliance and use their massive merchant shipping fleet in the war against the Empire. The regent of the Mon Cala people refuses, but Leia decides to rescue their King, who has been held captive since the Clone Wars, and so the team kidnaps the Imperial sector Moff to aid in this rescue. Unfortunately, when they eventually get there, they learn the King is actually on life-support, but he is able to record a final message of defiance before the Moff secretly raises the alarm and all hell breaks loose. The Mon Cala regent confiscates the datachip with the recording on, and so Leia believes the mission to have been a bust, but he has a change of heart and broadcasts it to the entire Mon Cala fleet, causing them to rise up against the Empire.

This storyline should have been a pretty important turning point, I know, but I found myself a bit bored by it overall. I think I’m beginning to tire of seeing the big three characters in all the same storylines – it’s like there are no other Rebel characters, and the whole Alliance would have fallen without our heroes. I think the biggest problem here is that it has been established since time immemorial that there are three years between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, and so the need to fill in that gap with episode of the week style content has led to so much boring, bland struggles that never have any real stakes because we know nothing can happen to the golden three.

Anyway, the final story to cover today is the Rogue One tie-in comic about Cassian Andor and K-2SO that has been mentioned quite a bit recently for the fact that season two of Andor has recently shot this one out of the water in terms of how Cassian and K-2 meet. In the show, K-2 is salvaged from the Ghorman Massacre and taken back to Yavin for re-wiring, whereas in the comic Cassian is on a mission to gain some Imperial intel and is able to rewire the droid on the fly so that it doesn’t arrest him. The comic is frankly more than a bit goofy, and while I thought their meeting on Ghorman was a bit convenient, I think I prefer that version of events. I think the show has somewhat left the door open for the comic to still exist, by suggesting the record will be rewritten or something, so it’s always possible that the comic represents the version of events that have been implanted in K-2’s circuits. It’s interesting to note that this is possibly the first instance where we have the new canon stuff directly contradicting itself – something the Story Group had assured us would never happen back when they removed the EU in 2014. I think the situation now is that any story is “canon” until something comes out that directly contradicts it, in which case live action always takes precedence. But to a large extent, that is how it was in the pre-Disney days. Hm.

Speaking of the EU, I’ve decided the time is right to go back to where it all began, and am currently re-reading Heir to the Empire for the billionth time. My intention, though, is to continue with the Marvel comics as we move into summer, as I want to continue to explore the Doctor Aphra series as well as some of the other things I’ve got…

Marvel Champions against the Sinister Six!

Hey everybody,
It’s been a while since I played Marvel Champions, but after picking up the Silk hero pack last week, I’d been planning how best to take her out and see what the deal is. In the event, I opted to play a scenario I’d never played before, the Sinister Six from Sinister Motives, alongside my favourite hero, Spider Man himself.

The scenario is great – the campaign guide calls it a “chaotic melee” as the heroes battle each member of the crime gang, and having played a few of these multi-villain scenarios now, I think this is probably my favourite one. It reminds me a bit of a cartoon where the villains and heroes are in a ball of smoke and limbs, and you’ll see an occasional flash of someone’s head or fist surfacing. You don’t go up against all six at once, but rather it’s 1+ the number of players, so as I’m playing two handed solo, that’s three. There are treachery cards in the deck that bring out more, though, and so early on, I had five of them in play!

That said, they have between 7-9 hit points each, so it’s not too tough to get them defeated. The only problem with that is, they can come back! You need to defeat the villains to help remove threat from the side scheme though, as thwarting that is how you win – you just need to survive against the continual onslaught to escape.

It’s so good, anyway, I think it has surprised me really, because scenario 4 in one of these boxes can sometimes be a difficult one. Though Hela is in the same position in Mad Titan’s Shadow, and I really enjoyed that one, as well…

The other exciting thing about this game was playing Silk, who has only recently come out. Part of the Agents of SHIELD wave, I think she was only marginally above Shuri as Black Panther in terms of how much I want them (that is to say, not much). I think this mainly stems from my familiarity with the comics though.

As it turns out, her deck is great to play. Protection isn’t my favourite aspect (so she was really fighting an uphill battle, wasn’t she!) but I think this version of protection is probably my favourite way to play, which is that you’re mainly playing the game during the villain phase.

Her gimmick is that she can tuck cards under her identity, up to a max of four, and certain other of her cards will interact with what exactly is under there. Otherwise, you can discard one of the tucked cards while in alter-ego to draw two cards, so there’s always an upside there.

I think I’ve had two surprises here, then, in that the Sinister Six were a lot of fun to go up against, but also Silk, a hero I had little to no interest in, has proven to be a ton of fun and I’m really looking forward to playing her again.

I absolutely love it when a game gets you like this…

Star Wars comics update

I’m continuing to collect my way through the last batch of Star Wars comics, from the 2020 runs that cover the ongoing series, the Darth Vader series, Bounty Hunters and Doctor Aphra. There are a bunch of crossovers across all four titles in this era, starting with the War of the Bounty Hunters storyline, then taking in Crimson Reign, Hidden Empire, and Dark Droids. I’ve heard the general consensus is that there were too many crossovers, but up to now I’ve only read to the first one, though, and on the whole I think it was a bit repetitive having the storyline across all four titles with an additional book covering the events as well…

But we’ll see! I’m more excited to see the individual story strands though, especially the Vader arc that involves the Naboo handmaidens.

I’m quite pleased with my collection to date!

Marvel Crisis Protocol: MOAR terrain

Oh, wrong franchise…

I recently panic-bought the NYC terrain pack for Marvel Crisis Protocol, a supplement to the original core set terrain inasmuch as it is a basic duplication of the cars, street lights and dumpsters, but along with a second Daily Bugle kiosk, we also get a coffee shop kiosk as well.

More terrain is always good, of course. AMG may want the boards to be fairly light in terms of what’s on them, but personally I like the look of more stuff on the table, regardless of whether I’m playing characters who can throw it around or not.

I say that I panic-bought it, because I’d not seen it available for a bit, then saw this set on Amazon for £25. What a bargain! So I now have this, as well as the terrain from both core sets, the commercial trucks, and Deadpool’s truck. Not too shabby, though unfortunately very little of it is actually painted, as I find it tricky to paint stuff to actually look like realistic cars…

The other reason for wanting this terrain specifically is the one-shot cards that were released a while back. A lot of the newer terrain, such as the Wakanda pack, have come with these cards to add more rules than simply having objects on the table you can throw, and AMG has retroactively applied the same idea to other bits of terrain. In the article I linked to, there are cards that give effects like the Oscorp chemical truck, for which you roll dodge dice based on your energy stat when it’s thrown at you, or the Daily Bugle kiosk that lets you reroll one defence or dodge dice if you’re within range 1 of it (because you benefit from the news…)

On the whole, I think they’re a great idea, and in the case of the coffee shop, which gives nearby characters additional power in the power phase (caffeine and carbs, baby!) it may prove a deterrent against destroying that terrain feature. However, these one-shots can also affect the overall crisis threat level. Many of them are +0, but some either increase or decrease the threat level, making for even more interesting games! James and I are planning a 23-threat game tomorrow that includes one-shot cards, and I have it in the back of my mind to try at least one game where all of the terrain I have included it’s dedicated one-shot card, which interestingly would all cancel each other out for a net +0 to the overall threat level. Which is probably just as well, as that would be six pieces of terrain with active rules in play… 🥴