Sunday, January 25, 2015

Star Wars #1 Review

Two Wednesdays ago, Marvel Comics (/Disney/Lucasfilm) published the first issue in its new line of Star Wars comics. This was a bittersweet event for me. I first started reading Star Wars comics with Dark Horse's release of the Dark Empire title back in 1991. While I didn't love everything that Dark Horse produced, I though they did an excellent job of maintaining the brand. When Disney acquired Lucasfilm last year and announced that Marvel would regain the license, I was sad to hear it. Even so, I was interested to see what Marvel would do in the aftermath of the consolidation.

To Marvel's credit, this premiere seems to have been highly anticipated--so much so, in fact, that my friendly local comic store was sold out when I went to buy the issue on the next day, and so I had to wait a week in order to do so. C'est la vie.

As a first impression, I like the art. It's fairly straightforward, and the characters look how they're supposed to look. The action starts up quickly, and there are a number of moments that really capture the Star Wars feel.

On the other hand, I'm concerned about the focus and scope of the storyline. It features the main characters from A New Hope--and doing a nice job of including Chewie and the droids in meaningful roles, by the way. It also brings in Darth Vader. While I can understand starting the series with a bang, I'm worried that we'll see too many near-miss confrontations between Luke and Vader, and that it will become tiresome. I'd also like to see more original characters, ones that might actually be killed during combat. Only time will tell, I guess.

-Nate

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