Rounding
out my Yay New Star Wars Film Celebratory Look At Posts Trilogy with, fittingly,
something with Empire in the title, it’s Heir to the Empire, the first in the
Thrawn Trilogy.
Star
Wars: Heir to the Empire is considered somewhat important by the Star Wars
fandom (do they have a name? Warsies?), a novel by Timothy Zahn it’s considered
to be the starting point for the resurgence in Star Wars’ products and profile
that’s continued to this day as well as a large and serious focus on the
Expanded Universe – now known as Legends. Released in 1991 it was the first
Star Wars title published by Bantam Spectra and although Dark Horse Comics’
Dark Empire (originally planned for Marvel Comics) was in development at the
same time it seems Heir’ was put into production first and Bantam’s deal with
Lucasfilm really was the spark that got Star Wars rolling again after nearly a
decade of not much at all. It’s was/is considered by many fans to be the ‘true’
sequel to Return of the Jedi, even though several things set after that film
had already been put out, hence why we’re I’ve chosen it for this, the Thrawn
Trilogy being in many fans eyes it seems the first attempt at what Disney is
now starting with The Force Awakens, Dark Horse adapted the book in 1995, the
script was handled by Mike Baron, the creator of Badger and co-creator of Nexus
(with Stephen Rude) as well as the writer who first wrote Wally West’s time as
The Flash with art by two French artists Olivier Vatine and Fred Blanchard who
I know nothing about and haven’t done much each in American comics according to
comicbookdb though I’m presuming they both had more work published in their
native France.
Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: Heir to the Empire issues 1-6)
Let’s
see how quick this summary turns out to be when it’s summarising six issues. NOT-AT-ALL-Quick Summary: Five Years after
Return of the Jedi and the Empire is in bits, the Imperial fleet under Grand
Admiral Thrawn is attacked but thanks to Thrawn’s knowledge and tactical skill
they prevail. While Luke mopes, Han, Chewie and Wedge try to recruit smugglers
to the New Republic’s cause, they fail but learn the new top gangster is a
Talon Carrde, who we see ‘promote’ a woman named Mara Jade and make nice with
the Thrawn, the Emprie take some Ysalamiri and go visit the Emperor’s old
private storehouse, though they actually want it’s guardian, an old Jedi
bastard named Master C’Baoth, using the Ysalamiri to keep his Force powers at
bay (they naturally push The Force back, no-one knows why). He’s not interested
until Thrawn promises him the Skywalker twins, then he joins up. Admiral
Ackbar’s locking horns (tentacles) with Fey’lya, another councilman then Luke,
Solo, Chewie, Artoo and Threepio all accompany Leia (who’s pregnant) to
Bimmisaari where they’re ambushed by Gohri, the Emperor’s private death
commandos. Han causes a scuffle with some market traders to allow Luke’s
awesome escape from the aliens to catch up with them and they leg it off-world,
Solo tricking Leia so they don’t have to return.
Thrawn sets plans in motion
for an attack on Sluis Van, ordering to have some Mole Miners (which are robots
as it turns out) 'acquired' and he, C’Baoth and Thrawn’s captain hash out a plan to trap
Luke via putting rumour of C’Boath’s existence out there. Thrawn isn’t very
fond of the Jedi Master but his power does allow them to make attacks on three
different fronts at the same time. This includes Bpfassh and Leia is dispatched there, but Luke
can't come because they hate Jedi and once drove a load of Dark Jedi to
Degobah, bringing this up makes Luke want to go back to Yoda’s retirement home,
so he does. An attack on Bpfassh by the Gohri and a fake Millennium Falcon (and
Solo wielding a lightsabre, so cool!) convinces Solo to hide Leia, so he heads
to find Lando. On Degobah Luke goes into THAT cave and has a vision of Mara
Jade, he also finds an artefact that leads HIM to Lando, the two meet up over
the planet his current mining operation is on only to be attacked by the
Empire, Luke zones out as C’Boath contacts him so that turns out to be an
anti-climax. Lando’s lost half his mole miners (51) but helps with plan ‘Hide
Leia’, they perform a switch using the Falcon and the Lady Luck (Lando’s ship),
using C-3PO to impersonate Leia’s voice on the Falcon while Chewie takes the
Lady to his homeworld of Kashyyyk but Thrawn figures it out1 and
sends some Gohri. On his way to meet C’Boath Luke gets intercepted but pulls
off a cool manoeuvre involving trapping X-Wing laser torpedoes in the Star
Destroyer’s tractor beam, sadly it burns out parts of his ‘Wing and he runs out
of oxygen while trying to fix it, happily he’s found, unhappily it’s by Karrde
and Mara Jade, a lady who really hates him and wants to kill him. Luke is tasered
unconscious. Leia meanwhile arrives on Kashyyyk and the layouts are confusing.
Luke wakes up on Myrkr and
meets Mara Jade and Karrde again; his Force powers turned off by the local
population of Ysalamiri, Karrde hasn’t decided whether to give Luke over the
Empire yet or not. Meanwhile Han and Lando cheat a game of cards to help out
Flynn Torve in order to get him to take them and Threepio to Karrde. Their
arrival forces Karrde to hide Luke away in a cell which he easily escapes from
using his artificial hand’s power supply. Karrde and Jade’s dinner with Solo
and Calrisian is interrupted by Thrawn, who wants more Ysalamiri and to give
Karrde shit for not helping search for Luke. Things get hectic – Karrde hides
the New Republicans because they’re his guests, then Luke escapes and Mara
chases after him, desperate to evade her Luke pulls of a manoeuvre that crashes
both their ships in the forest miles away. Another one of Thrawn’s dinner
guests clues Lando and Han into everything so far as Thrawn lands. Luke and
Mara then have to work their way back to Karrde’s compound with the Empire
looking for them to ‘help’ Karrde who’s said they’re dodgy, we learn that Mara
Jade used to be Emperor Palpatine’s ‘Hand’, his top assassin, until Luke killed
him and ruined her life. Lando and Han do some detective work and force Karrde
to tell them Luke’s around, Thrawn has also figured this out, fuck knows where
Master C’Boath is, still waiting for Luke to turn up on that other planet I
suppose.
That night Mara Jade saves
Luke’s life from the local monsters and Leia is attacked again, but this time
the Gohri gets close enough to smell her and proclaims her the Mal’ary’ush and
lets her go, there was also an attack on Kashyyk at the same time but none of
that is shown because large panels of Leia in her underwear is more important,
Chewie sorts out the Gohri but Leia has him keep the attacker alive. turns out
Leia shares the scent of her father and the Gohri pretty much worship Darth
Vader after he saved them, they agree to meet her above Endor in a month.
Threepio gets a message to Artoo (who’s with Luke and Mara, sorry) and then
Luke saves Mara from the local wildlife to help them bond. Above Myrkr the
cloaking device Thrawn’s had being built since he found the parts with C’Boath
is successful tested, he can now hide a Star Destroyer. Mara gives Luke his
lightsabre back and then helps disguise him (aww she does like him really) then
they get captures (on purpose) so does Han and they plan an ambush that end sin
dropping a whole stone archway on the Imperials, the only hold up is Lando and
Torve arguing over trusting Luke (Lando does, Trove doesn’t) that gets Lando
injured. The Imperial arses thoroughly kicked Han decides to take Luke’s X-Wing
to get fixed…at Sluis Van! (Karrde and co evacuate the Myrkr). At Sluis van
Thrawns’ plan goes perfectly, cloaked he sneaks his Star Destroyer in
accompanied by an empty freight, which explodes and is full of TIE-Fighters!
Wedge leads the Rogue squadron against the attackers but while they’re detected
the Mole Miners are sent out, Thrawn is stealing himself a fleet! Until the
Falcon blindly stumbles across this huge attack and becomes the fly in the
ointment, setting off the Mole Miners to scuttle the ships so at least Thrawn
doesn’t have them, Thrawn runs. Leia then calls in to say Admiral Ackbar has
been arrested – dun dun dun!
This
has the strangest choice of cliff-hanger ending I can think of; in fact the
pacing is somewhat arsebackwards the whole series but instead of say, having
Thrawn have stolen the ships, or blown something up, or something else big and
dramatic the cliff-hanger is the bloke who says ‘it’s a trap’ being arrested,
Admrial Ackbar was about the F-plot of this story, in fact I wasn’t even aware
I should be paying attention to it, I thought the scenes were there to benefit
Han and Leia’s plots. That actually encapsulates my critics for the whole comic - too much going on, weird pacing choices and no flow. There's so many scenes per issue,
refreshing in today’s world of decompressed writing for the trade style of
comic books but it can become overwhelming and a little confusing, mostly due
to the lack of simple things like information caption boxes telling us simple
things like what planet we’re on. A novel can throw scenes at you and have them all be contained with no flow between thanks to the chapter format they employ but that really doesn't translate so well to a comic format and with some chapters translating to as little as a page it becomes a
bit choppy and segmented. The pacing and focus issues are, on reflection, possibly caused by the same thing, which can be boiled down to 'pages given to an event relative to how important it is', fuck this up and the book feels weird, this book feels weird. For instance: Thrawn is given lots of page time during the build up but his 'finale' (final scene) in Sluis Van isn't given half the page time of the events of Karrde's planet, which thanks to how many panels it takes up feels like the actual finale with Sluis Van scene just tacked on the end as an almost epilogue of sorts and makes the book appear to be badly written, like wasted too much time on Thrawn when Karrde and Mara Jade were really the more featured characters later on. I actually think this isn't the case and it's due to just giving the each scene in the book the panels it requires rather than the panels it needs to get across what's going on.
Mara Jade's arse will be the focus of this panel because...? |
The
art’s… very European, the closest equivalent I can think of is Chris Bachalo
though it’s not quite as stylized as that (but few things are), it also puts me
in mind of the official artwork for the Street Fighter Alpha trilogy if you
remember that (Edayan I think?); I’m not going to say it doesn’t work because
it does look good, often very dynamic, and you can see the actors within the
style but I never really quite understood why companies have these really
cartoony exaggerated artists work on books based on live action properties,
it’s just so… illogical. There isn’t any comparison stuff on Wookieepedia so I have
no idea how closely the comic follows the book buuut at there isn’t any comparisons
stuff on Wookieepedia I’m going to assume it must be pretty good, the dialogue
and movie characters are all fine but by being so isn’t particularly noteworthy,
everyone’s in character and it makes up for the weird pacing and sensory
overload level of scenes.
What
else? The new characters! Karrde’s a very disappointing replacement for Jabba
the Hutt, you can’t go from a huge pervo-slug to a bloke with a Durango
moustache and not have it feel like a let-down, this bloke feels like he should
be jobbing for Stone Cold Steve Austin or carrying amps for Motorhead not
running a universe’s worth of organised crime, as a character though he’s quiet
likable, it’s nice to have an honour amongst thieves character replacing the
brutal self-serving Jabba. Mara Jade... she’s often straddles the line of
Mary-Suedom but mostly she stays on the cool side, the time she spends with
Luke in the forest is great, they have genuine chemistry and it puts her over
well, you can see in these scenes alone why people took to her as much as they did/do/have
- she’s actually one of my favourite Star Wars gals. Thrawn is awesome, he’s
the complete opposite of Vader and Sidious but he still rocks the same level of
presence – while wearing white of all things! He’s calm, knowledgeable and
genre savvy but still fallible and gets his arse kicked pretty spectacularly,
what confirmed by liking of him how well he reacts to it, he admits he lost and
pulls out, no stomping, no blasting of laser in frustration, no blaming anyone
and everyone, just pulls out. The Gohri, eeeeh, they’re endemic of a problem
have with new races added in a lot of expanded universe material, not just for
Star Wars, but for Star Trek, Doctor Who, most things based on live-action
properties – they don’t look like special effects, they look like cartoon/comic
characters, this is partly to do with the whole ‘having cartoony artists draw
life action properties’ but some of it’s just not putting enough effort in,
this is the early 90’s, how hard is it to watch a VHS of the Jabba’s Palace scene
and match your design appropriately – well it seems that I wasn’t the only one,
someone wrote into the series to say that they kind of didn’t look in-style
with the movie’s aliens and in reply they said ‘well LUCAS approved it’ (an
argument that will lose all weight once the Prequels start coming out) and
shows the design, which looks completely fucking different:
Look at that, that’s barely the same thing! |
I suppose it IS the first part in a trilogy (and the last time I read it all in one go the pacing didn’t seem too bad) but the best trilogies present us with a satisfying and complete story each part, surely? Thus
it’s my least favourite of the three Thrawn Trilogy comics, it’s little flaws
combine the worst on Kashyyk but they just niggle all the way through and the
art is the worst suited of the three (Terry Dodson draws the next mini, so
good) but it’s not bad, it can be badly paced but no, I can’t say it’s bad, flawed, we’ll call it flawed, a
flawed start to the Thrawn Trilogy, yes, that sounds professional and shit.
also I am never recapping six issues in one go ever again if I can help it!
That’s
your lot, thanks for wasting time on my ramblings, go look at porn or something. While you do I’m going to go do something very similar and watch The Force Awakens, which will either be a cause for celebration or a cause to shift all of those 'George Lucas is Satan' snarks over to J.J. Abrams, I'll know tomorrow.
1 there’s an error in the
original print of this, when Thrawn is going on about how he’s figured out the
switch he says that Leia and Chewie are on the Millennium Falcon, when they are
in fact on the Lady Luck, it confused me to hell until I realised it as just a
mistake.
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