Let's... Yora reads Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi/Knights of the Old Republic [Archive]

Yora

2016-01-18, 02:07 PM

Well, this started out a lot less amazing than I remembered it.

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389187218l/390087.jpg

There are two story arcs in this book, corresponding to the first two and three issues of the series respectively.

The story starts with an opening crawl telling us that this is long before the time of the Empire and the Rebellion and that there are many Jedi protecting the peace in the galaxy. The first picture is a group of spaceships flying over a planet. Nice touch, very traditional. Unfortunately they don't have anything to do with the story and right in the second image we get to the Jedi Master Arca and his three apprentices Ulic Quel-Droma, Cay Quel-Droma, and Todd Doneta on the planet Arkania. I didn't know that the planet was first mentioned here, but nothing is really said about it other than it being cold. Arca tells the three young Jedi of the planet Onderon which wishes to become part of the Republic. Once every year the moon Dxun gets close enough to the Onderon so that flying beasts can fly over and come hunting the local animals and people, which has forced the Onderonians to become very warlike and protect themselves in the giant city Iziz. The entire civilization is protected behind a massive wall, but what good that would do against beasts that can fly through air and space is a good question. At some point the rulers of Iziz decided to simply kick any troublemakers out of the city, but over the centuries some of them survived and created their own savage society in the jungles and tame some of the terrible creatures. Now the people of Iziz and the Beast Lords are in an eternal war and requested that the Jedi come to help and bring peace to Onderon. But Master Arca decides that he will not go and that this is a perfect opportunity to test his young apprentices instead.

Not only is this a massive task and extreme responsibility, it also is immediately obvious that you shouldn't send these guys trying to bring peace to an elementary school yard. Todd Doneta seems like a reasonable guy, but remains very bland because he never really does anything. But Uliq is an arrogant hot shot who seems as dumb as a brick and Cay is a total dork who doesn't seem to be aware about anything going on around him because he's always fiddling around with broken electronics. Master Arca reminds them that they are supposed to bring peace and only use their weapons in the uttermost emergencies. When the guards in Iziz tell them that Todd can not see the queen in the palace because aliens are not allowed, the first thing the other two Jedi do is turn on their lightsabers. This mission isn't going to turn out well.

The old queen has a beautiful daughter, who we need to be told is 18 years old, and as soon as Galia is introduced the Beast Lords attack the city and kidnap her. The queen is outraged and demands that the Jedi go and rescue her. Once they leave the city on their ship the Jedi are immediately shot down by a missile and crash in the jungle, but fortunately Todd Doneta has the power to communicate with animals. Might be the first time this power shows up in Star Wars, I'm not sure. He talks to a friendly dinosaur and with just four grunts he's become a honorary member of their pack and the dinosaurs agree to take them to the castle of the Beast Lords where Galia is to marry the son of the Beast Lord leader.

The Jedi arrive with lightsabers in hand, but of course this is all a terrible misunderstanding. The Beast Lord leaders have been sneaking into the city for years and have contact with hidden rebells inside Iziz, of which the princess seems to be one of the leaders. Because, as it turns out, the ruling family of Iziz are the descendants of the Sith apprentice Freedon Nadd and rule their people with the powers of the Dark Side. Quickly a new plan is made. The Jedi will confront the queen and ask her to agree to a peace between the two people and if this fails the Beast Lords will launch a massive attack to assault the city. Of course it fails immediately once the Jedi talk to the queen and she unleashes her Dark Side powers. Cay gets his arm hacked off by a guard but already begins to make a replacement from a droid arm while his brother is still applying first aid to the wound. This loon knows where his priorities lie. The Beast Lords attack the city but have difficulty fighting and controling their beasts under the influence of the Dark Side sorcery. Then Master Arca arrives in his ship and using the power of Battle Meditation dispels the sith sorcery and helps the attackers to storm the city. Battle Meditation was invented in Heir to the Empire, but I think this might be the first case where it was actually called that.

Master Arca goes to the hidden tomb of Freedon Nadd below the castle and forces the Dark Side away, which causes the old queen to just fall over and die without a fight. He is very angry with his apprentices for failing to restore peace and making the war even worse and tells them that they should have used Battle Meditation instead of charging into the throne room of the queen with their lightsabers. Uliq makes a very good point when he says that the master never told them about the existance of such a technique and he has to admit that this task was perhaps too great for them.

The second arc is longer in page count, but much shorter narratively. Nomi Sunrider is the wife of a young Jedi knight who is taking her and their daughter to a new master who will complete the final part of his training. They make a stop in some pirate port and somehow let slip that they are carrying a box of super valuable lightsaber crystals with them. Of course they get attacked immediately and the Jedi is killed, but he guides Nomi with the Force so that she can take up his lightsaber and kill the attackers. Still relying on the Force she finds the way to the planet of the mysterious Jedi master and meets an extremely handsome, half-naked man with a weird skull who invites her and her daughter to his home to tell him how they found this place. He reveals himself to be the Jedi Oss Willum and in a nice Yoda Reveal moment it turns out that he's really the apprentice and that his master Thon is really the big triceratops on which he is riding. As Nomi is strong in the Force and her daughter as well, Thon agrees to train them as Jedi. Then there's a "side plot" about a gang of pirates who are forced by a Hutt to find the Jedi Master, kill him, and find the crystals, but nothing actually happens there. It's only at the very end that the pirates show up at Thon's house and Nomi uses Battle Meditation to have the pirates and the Hutts mercenaries start fighting each other. And that's it. Nothing really happened other than Todd Doneta showing up and picking up Oss Willum to come help with fighting the remaining Dark Side followers on Onderon, which I believe will be the story of the next book.

I have to admit, this is actually pretty bad so far. The art in the third to fifth chapter is pretty ugly but that's a big step up from the awfulness of the first two which rarely even have any backgrounds for the pictures. It's just faces in front of a blue or orange or green background. But bad art is something I can live with if the story is good. Which it isn't. Aside from nothing happening, almost everything that is being said is done so by the narrator in boxes. It's a comic! It is pictures with speech bubbles! The standard advice is always "Show, don't tell", but here it feels like the creators would ask you confused "what is show?" It's all exposition, nothing happens, nobody does anything. Reminds me very much of the few glimpses I've taken at superhero comics. This is why I usually don't read American comics. I've read plenty of Japanese ones and piles of French ones, but this type of storytelling is just awful.
The one really cool thing I think is Master Thon.
A triceratops Jedi Master is awesome!

Looking at the credits in the front, I noticed that Kevin Anderson has not been involved in any way with the series at this point. This will become important later on when he does enter the picture. The series started in 1993, only two years after Heir to the Empire, so it's very early in the greater Expanded Universe.

Regarding building the Expanded Universe there is not a huge amount of things to find here, but there are some. As I mentioned, Arkania is briefly shown (as a yellow sphere in one image, because no background art) and Master Arca is an Arkanian, even though he's not told that yet. Onderon, Dxun, and Iziz all appeared in KotOR 2, I believe. We get to see Todd Doneta using the Force to control animals and also several uses of Battle Meditation. When the first KotOR game was in development, early plans where to have Nomi Sunrider as one of the heroes but eventually she developed into Bastila Shan. But she kept her Battle Meditation power.
It's also mentioned that Freedon Nadd came to Onderon because there can always be only one Sith Lord at any time and so instead he chose to become a king on some small backwater world instead of trying to overthrow his master. I don't know where the, in my oppinion somewhat silly idea of the Rule of Two first showed up, but there seems to be an early version of that here already.

russdm

2016-01-18, 03:23 PM

It's also mentioned that Freedon Nadd came to Onderon because there can always be only one Sith Lord at any time and so instead he chose to become a king on some small backwater world instead of trying to overthrow his master. I don't know where the, in my oppinion somewhat silly idea of the Rule of Two first showed up, but there seems to be an early version of that here already.

Oddly, I remember something being mentioned how Freedon Nadd killed his Sith master and then went to Onderon. I don't remember where it was.

Yora

2016-01-18, 03:30 PM

Maybe it will come up later. The next one is "The Freedon Nadd Uprising", that might be a likely place. :smallwink:

BWR

2016-01-18, 04:13 PM

Yora

2016-01-18, 05:19 PM

You mean the Jarael arc? I actually really liked that one. But it's true, the Zayne arc was even better than that. I actually stopped reading very soon after the first story was wrapped up, getting the impression that the writers were not really sure how to continue the series. But I gave it another try some months later and after the first couple of chapters I think it got really good. I'm excited to see how that holds up on second reading.

Kantaki

2016-01-18, 05:41 PM

TotJ was pretty pathetic, really, though "Redemption" was decent. Some nice ideas that would have been fun had they been written by better authors and had better illustrations, but as it is it's not very impressive.
The KOTOR comics were pretty good, despite a few stupid elements (like the giant space worms). Though I dislike the Force magic items that show up in way too many SW stories, the first arc was good and had great characters. The second arc was something of a let-down in comparison, being only OK-ish.

To be fair, the „space-worms” are from Episode V*. The whole plot was still weird, but at least they didn't invent a new beasty to fill the spot.

*Not that this makes them less ridiculous, but... well if they exist why not use them? (I bet Arcoh Adasca said something similar:smallbiggrin:)

Yora

2016-01-19, 10:41 AM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350409297l/390092.jpg

The story begins where we last left, with Tott Doneeta and Oss Wilum arriving at Onderon. Master Arca has decided to have the corpses of Freedon Nadd and the old queen brought to Dxun to free Iziz from the pervading power of the Dark Side, but giant drills burrow from the ground and deliver an army of sith cultists. They are lead by a guy in Darth Vader armor with a lot of added spiked called Warb Null. They rerieve the coffins of their dead leaders and retreat back underground. The new queen Galia reveals that her old father is still alive in a hidden room beneath the palace and that he might be able to tell them how to get rid of the Dark Side influence. Then the ghost of Optimus Prime appears. I mean of Freedon Nadd. He gives the old king new strength to rise from his bed, knock out Master Arca and carry him away while Warb Null shows up to keep Ulic occupied.
"...then, with one magnificent blow of his lightsaber, Ulic Qel-Droma ends the brief career of Warb Null!" Indeed, it lasted only nine pages in which he neither did nor said anything. The army of the cultists is taking over the city and so the Jedi and the queen escape into the jungles with the Beast Lords to call the Jedi and the Republic for help.

On Ossus Master Thon and Nomi Sunrider arrive at the Jedi temple for her training. Here we meet master Vodo Siosk-Bas, who looks a bit like General Grievous and a lot like Doctor Zoidberg. Not sure if Grivous was inspired by him, but I think they could easily have been made to be the same species. Which I am pretty sure they are not. We also meet what I believe to be the first Miraluka in Star Wars. And unfortunately Nomi has her original haircut back that was thankfully abandoned after the very first issue with her. It's really awful. The Jedi recieve the call for help from Onderon and five Jedi are chosen to go, among them Nomi who has basically no training at all. But plot!

Meanwhile on Corruscant, the two bored rich young noobles Satal and Aleema Keto are visiting a museum because they are huge fans of the ancient Sith and have a secret fanclub with their friends back home in the Empress Teta system. While a janitor is dusting off some exhibits, they sneakily steal an old Sith book. Turns out they can't read it, but hear about the sith cult uprising on Onderon and think it's the perfect place to look for someone who might translate it. They arrive at the same time as the Republic troops and the Jedi reinforcements and are led to the old king who is leading the rebellion.

Somehow the Jedi figure out where the king is keeping Master Arca and Cay gets his robot arm chopped off again. While they face the king, the ghost of Freedon Nadd appears to the Keto Cousins and gives them some Sith artifacts before telling them to leave the planet. He then goes to where the king is fighting the Jedi and tells him that this rebellion is over and he's taking back the powers he's given him. The Jedi put the king in another coffin and send him to Dxun with the other two, and that's pretty much the whole plot.

This is better. Or to be more accurate, this is not quite as bad as the previous ones. There's still lot of explaining in boxes instead of showing things in pictures or dialogue, but I think it's much less annoying and obvious than before. And while the plot is banal, there's actually things happening. Not great things, but things. And nobody among the heroes does anything of relevance. Arca and his students are all there, as is Oss Willum, but they don't do anything. It's all about the old king and the Keto Cousins. Take what you can get. In the next story Kevin Anderson joins as a second writer and it's easy to see why. Tom Veitch just isn't any good at this.
The art improves again and it now starts to be almost passable. But that handsome Oss Willum now has a face like Jabba. :smallfrown:

Not sure if the planet Ossus does show up again in other places, but I think the name does ring some bell. It probably wasn't it's only appearance. Unless I am mistaken, we are here introduced to the Miraluka. And it's also explained that there used to be a Sith civilization which was then later taken over by dark Jedi who made themselves Dark Lords of the Sith. Not sure if that was ever mentioned before either. The Empress Teta system is also mentioned, which becomes very important in later comics.
What really surprised me is that Freedon Nadd had been dead for 400 years. That's such a sensible and believable number. With Star Wars comics I would much rather have expected something like 40,000 or 400,000 years. This makes way too much sense.

I am actually curious now how Dark Lords of the Sith will compare to that.

hamishspence

2016-01-19, 10:46 AM

Not sure if the planet Ossus does show up again in other places, but I think the name does ring some bell. It probably wasn't it's only appearance.

Ossus was created for Dark Empire - it comes up in the endnotes, though the protagonists don't actually visit it till Dark Empire II.

Interestingly it comes up in one of the first "newcanon" short stories - The End of History, in Star Wars Insider.

BWR

2016-01-19, 11:17 AM

To be fair, the „space-worms” are from Episode V*. The whole plot was still weird, but at least they didn't invent a new beasty to fill the spot.

*Not that this makes them less ridiculous, but... well if they exist why not use them? (I bet Arcoh Adasca said something similar:smallbiggrin:)

I know they're from ESB. The stupidity lay in making them unstoppable beasts of war rather than a curiosity.

Kantaki

2016-01-19, 11:55 AM

I know they're from ESB. The stupidity lay in making them unstoppable beasts of war rather than a curiosity.

Well, the plan to use the poor little cuties as weapons didn't really work out*. And most of the threat came from the sheer number that was gathered and from the control-system, augmentations and the hyperdrive Arcoh and his company installed.
Note that I agree that this part of the arc was a bit silly and maybe some other superweapon would have been better, but honestly? It isn't that surprising that someone tried to weaponize something that - with enough time and/or in great numbers - eat a whole star-system.

*I think even without the heroes' meddling something would have gone wrong. I mean selling a superweapon to several factions? Risky. All those factions at the same time? Stupid. Declaring that any price they pay is more of a tribute to keep said weapon pointed away from them? Really stupid. Forcing a traitorous, former employee to complete your new toy? Idiotic. KeepingJedi prisoner, especially during your attempt to make the greatest galactic superpowers kneel before you, moves the whole mess into the "You don't want to succed, do you?"-territory.

BWR

2016-01-19, 04:14 PM

Well, the plan to use the poor little cuties as weapons didn't really work out*. And most of the threat came from the sheer number that was gathered and from the control-system, augmentations and the hyperdrive Arcoh and his company installed.
Note that I agree that this part of the arc was a bit silly and maybe some other superweapon would have been better, but honestly? It isn't that surprising that someone tried to weaponize something that - with enough time and/or in great numbers - eat a whole star-system.

*I think even without the heroes' meddling something would have gone wrong. I mean selling a superweapon to several factions? Risky. All those factions at the same time? Stupid. Declaring that any price they pay is more of a tribute to keep said weapon pointed away from them? Really stupid. Forcing a traitorous, former employee to complete your new toy? Idiotic. KeepingJedi prisoner, especially during your attempt to make the greatest galactic superpowers kneel before you, moves the whole mess into the "You don't want to succed, do you?"-territory.

They're still big worms that you can shoot with big guns. Like the ones on a capital ship. You don't want 'super'weapons that will take a few years to get the job done. You want ones that can get the job done fast enough that people don't have time to stop them.
Sure, the rest of the situation in that episode was cringe-worthy (probably the lowest point of the series) but that was more like normal stuporvillain screw-ups compared to the worms.

Yora

2016-01-19, 04:20 PM

Was Adasca being a big villain a big reveal in the comic? I think it was.
We can talk about this when we get there.

Yora

2016-01-20, 01:54 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389187218l/390086.jpg

This is where Kevin Anderson joined in as the second writer. Checking out the release dates, I realized that the first issue of this comic was actually released on the same day as the last book of the Jedi Academy series that Anderson had written. And is widely considered to be quite bad. Given the time it takes to write a novel and publish it, and the time to write a 30 page comic and get it into stores, it seems very likely that the writing on this one only started when the Jedi Academy had already been completed. Which would mean that Anderson is now weaving his Old Republic Jedi lore together with that of Veitch's previous comics.
And it's easy to spot. The comic is really two separate and almost unconnected stories being told side by side, but which have really no effect on each other at all. Probably Anderson wrote the Exar Kun plot and Veitch the Ulic Quel-Droma plot and then they just alternated between the two every three or four pages.

The story opens with the ancient Sith Lord Naga Sadow escaping from his pursuers by blowing up two stars. Based on the narration it seems like Anderson had just learned about Type Ia supernovas, but did not understand them. But he thought exploding double stars are cool. It works and Sadow escapes while his pursuers are killed. Cool opening, but this scene has anything to do with anything else in the story at all.

We're introduced to the apprentices of Master Vodo Siosk Baas, whom we've seen before. Exar Kun and the two cathar Sylvar and... that other guy. Exar Kun is studying his masters holocron, in which he stored information about the powers of the ancient sith, even though he has been forbidden it. When confronted he tells his master that he can handle the powers of the Dark Side and that his master is undererstimating him. Master Vodo is really terrible at being a Jedi Master, as his students are all full of pride and anger and he has to intervene to prevent them from killing each other during ordinary lightsaber training. Insulted by this, Exar Kun starts a fight with by drawing on the power of his rage. Exar Kun and Sylvar are not acting in ways that are troubling. They are already deep in the Dark Side right up to their nose. Still, they are given an important mission without any supervision.

On Onderon, the Jedi are just preparing to send recovered Sith artifacts to the Jedi temple for safekeeping when Exar Kun shows up, claiming he is a Jedi archeologist on official business and demands to be given access to the artifacts despite Master Arcas explicit orders. Fortunately Arca shows up and sees through Exar Kun immediately, accusing him of making up the story of being an official archeologist and being the very last person who should get anywhere close to Sith artifacts. He's obviously a lot better than Master Vodo. But when Exar Kun says that he will find his answers anyway, Arca just lets him leave.
With the help of remaining Freedon Nadd cultists he finds the new tomb on Dxun where the ghost of the sith lord appears and tells him to take two hidden scrolls from his coffin and travel to the sith planet Korriban. Which he does.

Meanwhile the two nobles Satal and Aleema from Empress Teta kill their parents with their new Sith magic and take over control of the system. While Satal is the heir to the system, Aleema has obviously all the Force power. They are terrible villains who are just completely nuts with no plan or reason.
Ulic and Nomi are send to the Empress Teta system to destroy the dark side rulers and restore the government. Yeah, because Ulic did such a great job on Onderon? But their sith magic (that is: Aleema's sith magic) is too powerful and the Republic fleet retreats.

All the Jedi come together for a big meeting to discuss what should be done to destroy the dark side cult in Empress Teta and restore the democratic government. The system is named after a warlord who called herself empress, the leaders are all called lords, and the son of of them is called the heir to the system. I doubt they ever were democratic. But Ulic has a great plan. Instead of a massive invasion, he will go alone to infiltrate the dark side cult and learn of their sith magic, so that he can find a weakness that will allow the Jedi to destroy the cult completely without anyone slipping away.

No! Such an attemmpt will end in disaster... for you... and for all of us!
Listen to the blind lady, she knows what she's saying. This plan is hilariously dumb. And all the masters agree.

Meanwhile on Korriban, the spirit of Freedon Nadd leads Exar Kun to the tombs in the valley of the Sith. Exar Kun is okay with all that, but he's totally not doing anything like following the Dark Side. Really. Freedon Nadd seems to have enough of that and collapses the ceiling on him, but offering him the power to heal his fatal injuries if he goes to the Dark Side.

Noo...
Noo...
All right... yes... I accept.
Original lines taken from the same panel. His master Vodo senses the disturbance in the force, but is too far away to do anything about it. At that moment an army of battle droids is dropped from space on the jedi assembly. Ulic is almost killed but saved in the last second by his Master Arca. Arca is starting to hold a speech in the middle of combat but unfortunately talking is not a free action and he's stabbed in the back by a droid.

Master, the droid was behind you! I should have seen it!
It's always both funny and very sad when fiction appears to be amazed by how little sense it makes.

On Korriban, fighting lots of monsters with the dark side, Exar Kun still insists that he will never be seduced by the Dark Side. But he still goes to Yavin 4 as ordered and is captured there by the Massassi, the savage descendants of Naga Sadows sith warriors.

After the battle with the droids, the Jedi Masters tell Ulic that his plan is terrible, but if he wants to go and join a dark side cult to learn ancient sith magic, there is nothing they can do to stop him. As we leave we get a love story between Ulic and Nomi that lasts for all but half a page and is over as quickly as it began. But it's dramatic as they kiss with the wind blowing their hair.
When he arrives in Empress Teta, Satal and Aleema are instantly aware of it and start a public execution of protesters, just to see what Ulic will do. An uprising breaks out but Ulic remembers that he's here to earn the trust of the dark side disciples and kills the rebells with his lightsaber, saving Aleema's life. Nice job breaking it, hero. Satal doesn't buy it and sends Ulic to the torture chamber anyway.

Exar Kun is supposed to be eaten by a giant sith monsters but kills it instead and is made the new lord of the sith for that. His ship is destroyed, but thankfully Naga Sadow had put his old ship into storage and he can use it to leave Yavin 4 and fly to Empress Teta.

Ulic's friends are worried and Nomi decides to go check on him. Her first plan to find him once she arrives at the capital world is to pull out her lightsaber and getting herself arrested. Which works. She is brought before Satal and Aleema and that screws up Ulic's plan, who is just getting their confidence that he's really a dark Jedi who has turned away from the Jedi Order. Aleema, being the only character in the entire story who is actually somewhat smart, understand that this is not really a cover for him but actually the truth. Even if he doesn't think of it that way himself. Ulic says he will kill Nomi the next day to show his loyalty to the Dark Side, but when Satal finds out that he really plans for Nomi to escape he is outraged. Aleema is not. She knew Ulic's stupid plan right from the beginning and doesn't care that he has come to infiltrate her cult and end her reign since she doesn't think he can do it. Instead she plans to make him her own right hand. And I don't see anything that would indicate she's wrong about that.
Nomi escapes from the prison without any help and Satal sends an assassin to kill Ulic while in Aleema's bed. Ulic first kills the assassin and then confronts Satal and kills him as well to avenge Master Arca. Nomi returns with Ulic's other friends to get him back to the Jedi, but after dramatic debating decide that they can't force him to come with them as he has to turn away from the Dark Side by his own free will. Because this is the Jedi way! It also explains why the Jedi are never able to defeat the Sith for good and they always come back. When they let Dark Jedi just walk out the door and spend the next 20 years to plan the next Sith empire, this is exactly what you'd expect to happen.
Aleema and Ulic are just about to make themselves the new Empress and Emperor of the Empress Teta system when Exar Kun shows up. He and Ulic start a lightsaber fight but when their sith artifacts get close together, it summons the spirit of an ancient sith lord. Which from the look of his ridiculous hat appears to be Markar Ragnos. He tells them that Exar Kun is the new Dark Lord of the Sith and the Ulic shall be his apprentice.

The End.

While the series is getting gradually better with each story, it's still awful! But there's characters and things happening, which elevates the quality to "meh" levels instead of "completely terrible". There's a good number of supporting characters, but none of them ever does anything! Tott Doneeta calmed an animal in the first comic, Oss Willum said hello to Nomi before leading her to master Thon. But Sylvar, the other cathar, Dace, the Miraluka, and dinosaur guy never did anything! At all! They had some lines of dialogue, but those were completely irrelevant to the plot.

russdm

2016-01-20, 03:09 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389187218l/390086.jpg

This is where Kevin Anderson joined in as the second writer. Checking out the release dates, I realized that the first issue of this comic was actually released on the same day as the last book of the Jedi Academy series that Anderson had written. And is widely considered to be quite bad. Given the time it takes to write a novel and publish it, and the time to write a 30 page comic and get it into stores, it seems very likely that the writing on this one only started when the Jedi Academy had already been completed. Which would mean that Anderson is now weaving his Old Republic Jedi lore together with that of Veitch's previous comics.
And it's easy to spot. The comic is really two separate and almost unconnected stories being told side by side, but which have really no effect on each other at all. Probably Anderson wrote the Exar Kun plot and Veitch the Ulic Quel-Droma plot and then they just alternated between the two every three or four pages.

The story opens with the ancient Sith Lord Naga Sadow escaping from his pursuers by blowing up two stars. Based on the narration it seems like Anderson had just learned about Type Ia supernovas, but did not understand them. But he thought exploding double stars are cool. It works and Sadow escapes while his pursuers are killed. Cool opening, but this scene has anything to do with anything else in the story at all.

We're introduced to the apprentices of Master Vodo Siosk Baas, whom we've seen before. Exar Kun and the two cathar Sylvar and... that other guy. Exar Kun is studying his masters holocron, in which he stored information about the powers of the ancient sith, even though he has been forbidden it. When confronted he tells his master that he can handle the powers of the Dark Side and that his master is undererstimating him. Master Vodo is really terrible at being a Jedi Master, as his students are all full of pride and anger and he has to intervene to prevent them from killing each other during ordinary lightsaber training. Insulted by this, Exar Kun starts a fight with by drawing on the power of his rage. Exar Kun and Sylvar are not acting in ways that are troubling. They are already deep in the Dark Side right up to their nose. Still, they are given an important mission without any supervision.

On Onderon, the Jedi are just preparing to send recovered Sith artifacts to the Jedi temple for safekeeping when Exar Kun shows up, claiming he is a Jedi archeologist on official business and demands to be given access to the artifacts despite Master Arcas explicit orders. Fortunately Arca shows up and sees through Exar Kun immediately, accusing him of making up the story of being an official archeologist and being the very last person who should get anywhere close to Sith artifacts. He's obviously a lot better than Master Vodo. But when Exar Kun says that he will find his answers anyway, Arca just lets him leave.
With the help of remaining Freedon Nadd cultists he finds the new tomb on Dxun where the ghost of the sith lord appears and tells him to take two hidden scrolls from his coffin and travel to the sith planet Korriban. Which he does.

Meanwhile the two nobles Satal and Aleema from Empress Teta kill their parents with their new Sith magic and take over control of the system. While Satal is the heir to the system, Aleema has obviously all the Force power. They are terrible villains who are just completely nuts with no plan or reason.
Ulic and Nomi are send to the Empress Teta system to destroy the dark side rulers and restore the government. Yeah, because Ulic did such a great job on Onderon? But their sith magic (that is: Aleema's sith magic) is too powerful and the Republic fleet retreats.

All the Jedi come together for a big meeting to discuss what should be done to destroy the dark side cult in Empress Teta and restore the democratic government. The system is named after a warlord who called herself empress, the leaders are all called lords, and the son of of them is called the heir to the system. I doubt they ever were democratic. But Ulic has a great plan. Instead of a massive invasion, he will go alone to infiltrate the dark side cult and learn of their sith magic, so that he can find a weakness that will allow the Jedi to destroy the cult completely without anyone slipping away.

Listen to the blind lady, she knows what she's saying. This plan is hilariously dumb. And all the masters agree.

Meanwhile on Korriban, the spirit of Freedon Nadd leads Exar Kun to the tombs in the valley of the Sith. Exar Kun is okay with all that, but he's totally not doing anything like following the Dark Side. Really. Freedon Nadd seems to have enough of that and collapses the ceiling on him, but offering him the power to heal his fatal injuries if he goes to the Dark Side.

Original lines taken from the same panel. His master Vodo senses the disturbance in the force, but is too far away to do anything about it. At that moment an army of battle droids is dropped from space on the jedi assembly. Ulic is almost killed but saved in the last second by his Master Arca. Arca is starting to hold a speech in the middle of combat but unfortunately talking is not a free action and he's stabbed in the back by a droid.

It's always both funny and very sad when fiction appears to be amazed by how little sense it makes.

On Korriban, fighting lots of monsters with the dark side, Exar Kun still insists that he will never be seduced by the Dark Side. But he still goes to Yavin 4 as ordered and is captured there by the Massassi, the savage descendants of Naga Sadows sith warriors.

After the battle with the droids, the Jedi Masters tell Ulic that his plan is terrible, but if he wants to go and join a dark side cult to learn ancient sith magic, there is nothing they can do to stop him. As we leave we get a love story between Ulic and Nomi that lasts for all but half a page and is over as quickly as it began. But it's dramatic as they kiss with the wind blowing their hair.
When he arrives in Empress Teta, Satal and Aleema are instantly aware of it and start a public execution of protesters, just to see what Ulic will do. An uprising breaks out but Ulic remembers that he's here to earn the trust of the dark side disciples and kills the rebells with his lightsaber, saving Aleema's life. Nice job breaking it, hero. Satal doesn't buy it and sends Ulic to the torture chamber anyway.

Exar Kun is supposed to be eaten by a giant sith monsters but kills it instead and is made the new lord of the sith for that. His ship is destroyed, but thankfully Naga Sadow had put his old ship into storage and he can use it to leave Yavin 4 and fly to Empress Teta.

Ulic's friends are worried and Nomi decides to go check on him. Her first plan to find him once she arrives at the capital world is to pull out her lightsaber and getting herself arrested. Which works. She is brought before Satal and Aleema and that screws up Ulic's plan, who is just getting their confidence that he's really a dark Jedi who has turned away from the Jedi Order. Aleema, being the only character in the entire story who is actually somewhat smart, understand that this is not really a cover for him but actually the truth. Even if he doesn't think of it that way himself. Ulic says he will kill Nomi the next day to show his loyalty to the Dark Side, but when Satal finds out that he really plans for Nomi to escape he is outraged. Aleema is not. She knew Ulic's stupid plan right from the beginning and doesn't care that he has come to infiltrate her cult and end her reign since she doesn't think he can do it. Instead she plans to make him her own right hand. And I don't see anything that would indicate she's wrong about that.
Nomi escapes from the prison without any help and Satal sends an assassin to kill Ulic while in Aleema's bed. Ulic first kills the assassin and then confronts Satal and kills him as well to avenge Master Arca. Nomi returns with Ulic's other friends to get him back to the Jedi, but after dramatic debating decide that they can't force him to come with them as he has to turn away from the Dark Side by his own free will. Because this is the Jedi way! It also explains why the Jedi are never able to defeat the Sith for good and they always come back. When they let Dark Jedi just walk out the door and spend the next 20 years to plan the next Sith empire, this is exactly what you'd expect to happen.
Aleema and Ulic are just about to make themselves the new Empress and Emperor of the Empress Teta system when Exar Kun shows up. He and Ulic start a lightsaber fight but when their sith artifacts get close together, it summons the spirit of an ancient sith lord. Which from the look of his ridiculous hat appears to be Markar Ragnos. He tells them that Exar Kun is the new Dark Lord of the Sith and the Ulic shall be his apprentice.

The End.

While the series is getting gradually better with each story, it's still awful! But there's characters and things happening, which elevates the quality to "meh" levels instead of "completely terrible". There's a good number of supporting characters, but none of them ever does anything! Tott Doneeta calmed an animal in the first comic, Oss Willum said hello to Nomi before leading her to master Thon. But Sylvar, the other cathar, Dace, the Miraluka, and dinosaur guy never did anything! At all! They had some lines of dialogue, but those were completely irrelevant to the plot.

I think that the bit with Naga Sadow is funny, mainly because if you have read either part featuring him that it directly contradicts what we see here. But that might because this part was written earlier and the actual part with Sadow appearing in the first two chapters was written later? If this bit was written after the first and second chapter, then it is bizarre to describe things the way it is here.

Ulic's plan is more simply stupid, you know; it is completely based around his arrogant persona. There was a scene where Ulic holds a Sith Artifact and has Freedon Nadd appear to tell him that "Would be one of the great ones". The masters even show him a holocron lesson about how a Jedi joined the Dark Side thinking that the Jedi could control it, and this is supposed to be a story from the Sith Holocron picked up from Odan Urr earlier. Ulic gets plenty of warning about how his plan, to conquer the Dark Side, is unwise but Ulic just brushes off everyone's concerns.

He may be grieving over Arca's death, but never do you see him actually think about Arca would have done. He decides the best way of honoring his master is directly by doing something that Arca would never have even considered. It's not clear that Ulic actually learned anything really important from his time with Arca before. Stupid Ulic.

Vodo is not actually a bad master, he happens to have lousy students more. Exar Kun already was flawed before he showed up for training, I think, and it is clear that Exar lacks self-awareness. He actually is following a similar plan to what Ulic is doing but for less reasons. Exar actually thinks, like Ulic does, that he can conquer the Dark Side from within and he has just as much sheer arrogance as Ulic does. Nor does he even stop to consider that he is being stop either. He has started earlier on his journey than Ulic does, but they both end up in the same place, both having been corrupted by their ideas about conquering the Dark Side and in Exar's case, studying it with actually falling.

Joining the Dark Side entails more than just being angry, as here we have two Jedi fall because of their sheer arrogance. In fact, that arrogance seems to work better because it completely blinding either of them to what is really going on. A point that Aleema picks up on, and that Nomi doesn't: Ulic is falling by his own choice, not by the Sith poison because the poison just increases the Dark Side ability available.

There doesn't seem to much action by the Republic here, despite what we learn about it. It's also clear that the Jedi policy relating to Dark Siders is lousy.

Yora

2016-01-20, 03:28 PM

The sad thing about it is that The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are all about the dangers of slipping to the Dark Side and masters trying to intervene in a way that doesn't cause the student to stop listening to them completely. Trying to stop them from going on foolish quests by force wouldn't work, as the students need to trust their masters to keep them away from the Dark Side.

But in this comic the masters are all "Meh, whatever". Arca shows the most effort by refusing to let Exar Kun see the artifacts on Onderon, but that's really the only action anyone takes. But other than that he's not particularly wise either, always sending his high risk students on very challenging missions without supervision.
Simply letting Jedi with obvious Dark Side leanings roam freely in search for Sith powers is completely irresponsible.

http://i.imgur.com/IrXHYpZ.jpg

Closet_Skeleton

2016-01-20, 05:27 PM

I actually like the Art in The Saga of Nomi Sunrider. Freedon Nadd Uprising's art is the worst (why is she going bald every other art change?) In general the art in Tales of the Jedi is less uneven than in KotOR, the colouring is just old fashioned and not in a interesting way (I find four colour comic style to actually be better than a lot of modern colouring, so old fashioned isn't a complaint from me).

You missed the last volume of KotOR, (the unumbered) War. Which is quite good.

Yora

2016-01-21, 05:48 AM

The coloring is done with the fill tool in photoshop. The last issue of Dark Lords of the Sith is the first that introduced color gradients. And Nomis haircut changing back and fourth several times is also very noticable.

Yora

2016-01-29, 04:22 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403199483l/390088.jpg

The chaos in the Empress Teta system has caught the attention of the Mandalorians, who consider it a prime target for a nice, messy, and very bloody invasion, just as they like it. However, the leader Mandalore makes an offer to Ulic to fight him in a duel to the death. The winner gets all the forces of his opponent to add them to their own. Since this Mandalorian invasion really doesn't fit into Ulic's timetable and he agrees. Ulic defeats Mandalore but spares his life, because he can use an experienced general, especially one who knows the Mandalorian troops. With his fleet now doubled in size, Ulic attacks several Republic bases to create confusion among his enemies.

Meanwhile Exar Kun returns to the Jedi and tells some of the knights that he has discovered ancient Jedi knowledge that he wants to share with them, even though their masters are too afraid of having those powers known by their apprentices. Cay Qel-Droma and Oss Willum really should know better after Master Arca was very clear that he doesn't want Exar Kun anywhere near Sith artifacts, but now that he's dead there is nobody there to stop them from agreeing to this offer. On Ossus, the home of the Jedi temple, Exar Kun meets with Master Odan Urr, the ancient loremaster and kind of leader of the Jedi Order and kills him with the Dark Side to steal a Sith holocron from him. Seconds later the other Jedi arrive and Exar Kun tells them that the ancient master died from old age right after he gave him the holocron for safekeeping. Seems completely plausible to the other Jedi knights and they set out for Yavin 4.

Ulic decides that he is going to start a full out attack on Coruscant with the fleets of Empress Teta and the Mandalorians. Exar Kun is against it, but since he's currently half a galaxy away there isn't anything he can do to stop him. So he let's him go through with it, whatever. But he better not come back and cry when his precious fleets are destroyed.
The attack on Coruscant works perfectly but at one point Aleema simply tells Mandalore that Ulic has been killed in battle and that they have to retreat. This leaves Ulic alone with a lot of angry Jedi and he is arrested and to stand trial.

At the Sith ruins on Yavin 4 the Jedi who have followed Exar Kun notice that the place is very strong in the Dark Side. But that's also okay, because he has brought them all to the place so that together they can drive out the Dark Side influence. Makes senses. He also reveals that the holocron from Odan Urr is also a Sith artifact and that he intends to destroy it to neutralize the threat it poses. Before anyone can raise the question if this is all a trap to turn them to the Dark Side, he smashes the holocron and it's energies somehow possess the other Jedi making them loyal minions for Exar Kun.

When Mandalore hears about Ulic's arrest, he figures out that Aleema has betrayed him and wants to rule alone. But since he swore to serve Ulic and not her, Mandalore contacts Exar Kun to help him stage a rescue. During Ulic's trial in the senate chamber, Exar Kun simply walks through the door and kills the chancelor and hold some pointless speech. At that point the other Jedi arrive, among them his old master Vodo Siosk-Bas. He makes the master an offer to have another lightsaber fight and if he loses he will stand down and do whatever his master decides to do with him. But if he wins his master must join him on the Dark Side. Vodo, in a rare moment of making sense, refuses to ever serve the Sith. Exar Kun shrugs and they have a lightsaber fight anyway. Because he really needs to show of his new double-bladed lightsaber. So edgy and badass!
Exar Kun wins, Vodo Siosk-Bas dies. They take Ulic and leave.

Ulic decides to not kill Aleema immediately for her attempt to get rid of him and steal his Mandalorians but instead sends her on a mission with a small fleet. She is to lure some Jedi from Ossus to a nearby decimal star system where she will destroy them with her sith magic. The Jedi fall for it and send a couple of knights we've seen standing in the background and never actually doing anything many times throughout the series so far. She uses a variant of the trick used by the ancient Sith Lord Naga Sadow many, many chapters previously in a scene that appeared completely out of context and without purpose. As the republic fleet approaches with the Jedi on board, she somehow teleports the core of one of the stars right next to them, completely roasting the fleet. But removing the core from a supergiant star has some unexpected, but completely unsurprising side effects and it triggers all ten stars to turn supernova, instantly vaporizing Aleema's fleet.

Not only did this destroy a good portion of the Republic fleet and a bunch of Jedi, it also means that nearby Ossus needs to be immediately evacuated before the radiation of the supernovas reaches the planet. And somewhat surprising for a comic like this, they actually got it right that such an explosion would take a good amount of time to reach a nearby star system. It would have to be an extremely close nearby system to get there within a few months and in the comic it looks more like a day at most, but still, the thought is appreciated. That's much better than Episode 7 in which laser beams travel between star systems in a matter of seconds. Or whatever that silly thing was supposed to represent.
While the Jedi are packing up the most valuable things they can get this quickly, Ulic and Exar Kun arrive to raid the Jedi archives for anything that looks useful while the locals are fleeing the supernovas. This is actually a smart sounding plan that even seems like it could work. Make it a massive coronal mass ejection instead of a supernova and you could use this in a serious hard sci-fi story. Those would give you an evacuation window of one or two days before a planet at Earth distance gets heavily irradiated and suffers massive global EMP. I'm impressed. This is the first almost smart idea I've seen in this comic series.
However, Ulic is confronted by his brother Cay and in a moment of anger cuts of his robotic arm with his lightsaber. For the third time! And then kills him. It seems he really didn't want it but had a momentary slip of the Dark Side and immediately regrets having done it. Nomi really has enough now and uses her special powers to block all of Ulic's Force powers permanently. Exar Kun doesn't care and just leaves him behind with the Jedi to return to his base on Yavin 4.

At the same time the Mandalorians had been send to Onderon to look for Sith artifacts left over from the cultists of Freedon Nadd. But the beastriders have help from the Republic and the Mandalorians are easily defeated, forcing the last survivors to retreat to the jungle moon Dxun where Mandalore is killed by the local beasts. I am not rushing through this or skipping any details. This is really all that happens there.

Ulic tells the Jedi where Exar Kun is hiding and a Republic fleet flies to Yavin 4. Exar Kun anticipated their arrival and prepared a huge sacrifice ritual of the entire Massassi population to make himself immortal. It works, but now his spirit is trapped below the temple.

Aw, damn...

The End.

The writing for this story has been written entirely by Kevin Anderson with Tom Veitch no longer being involved. And I have to say it's the best out of the four arcs so far. I've been saying lots of bad things about Anderson in the past, but now I almost feel like I have to appologize. Him joining the series clearly improved it and I now learned that Veitch was also responsible for the comic Dark Empire. Which simply can never be forgiven. It makes the story of The Force Unleashed look good and like a clever extension of the movies.

Unless I am mistaken, this is the first appearance of the Mandalorians, other than Boba Fett's mandalorian armor. Wookipedia says it was actually the Star Wars Holiday Special, but I think we can all agree that that doesn't count. The Mandalorians here are pretty much the ones we know and perhaps might love right from the first page. The Mandalore at the top and they live to fight. We only get to see a single Mandalorian without a helm, who is a Taung, which were later clarified to be the species from which the Mandalorian society originally evolved.
Sadly, they are completely underused. There is the duel between Mandalore and Ulic early on and later Mandalore tells on Aleema and asks Exar Kun to help him free Ulic. That's all the Mandalorians do until they are send to Onderon to be quickly killed off.

However, that being said, Mandalore probably has more agency in this comic than any other character. He actually does things. Two of them! Everyone else follows the old pattern of just standing around and moving their mouths without anything containing information coming out. Aleema, who I consider the most interesting and proactive character in the series so far, only gets a single moment here when she decides to ditch Ulic and go back home with the Mandalorians but then she's also killed off quickly without anyone taking notice. The background Jedi are as bad as always, or even worse. Oss Willum, Tott Doneta, and Silvar are present and have a few lines, but don't contribute to anything. Not that anyone other than Exar Kun is doing anything, though.

There is still no actual plot and everything is just forgetable exposition, but at the very least it's now all coming from the mouths of characters instead of the narrator babling on in square boxes.

It's better, but it's still bad. I am glad it's over.

The next two comics would be the prequels which are all about the ancient Sith Lords with Makar Ragnos and Naga Sadow. Since that's actually more interesting lore and they are shorter than the Ulic Saga I think I'll be covering those two as well. But then I'll go to Knights of the Old Republic when things are actually getting good! :smallbiggrin:

hamishspence

2016-01-29, 06:11 PM

Unless I am mistaken, this is the first appearance of the Mandalorians, other than Boba Fett's mandalorian armor. Wookipedia says it was actually the Star Wars Holiday Special, but I think we can all agree that that doesn't count.

Marvel Star Wars had a Mandalorian arc between the releases of TESB and of ROTJ.

Yora

2016-01-29, 06:38 PM

I see. That one somehow gets always overlooked and not referenced by any other works. It's almost being treated as a different continuity from the EU.

hamishspence

2016-01-29, 07:00 PM

During the Classic era, yes. After the NJO was nearly over and the prequel movies started coming out - they began to be referenced more - with Marvel characters like Lumiya and Fenn Shysa of Mandalore getting roles in prequel stories (Shysa) and Legacy of the Force (Lumiya).

Cronal "Blackhole" from the Los Angeles Times comic strips:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_comic_strip

was the primary villain of Matt Stover's Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, and the Ryder Windham book The Life of Luke Skywalker made use of several events from that series (Luke meeting an Imperial governor and his daughter, both of whom turn out to be droid decoys, and Luke's run-in with a "mind-witch" who attempts to drain his life).

Yora

2016-01-30, 01:19 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403202261l/390089.jpg

A thousand years before Freedon Nadd established a dynasty of Dark Jedi on Onderon, the warlord Empress Teta was fighting her enemies over control of their system. The story begins with the young Jedi scholar Odan-Urr arriving at her palace where he shares with her Jedi Knight assistant the ancient Force power of Battle Meditation he has rediscovered in old scrolls. With this power the two Jedi are able to help Empress Teta to defeat her reamaining opponents quickly and like any sensible warlord she renames the system after herself. With the civil war over and the help of the Jedi, she hopes to be able to soon join the Republic.

Meanwhile two young hyperspace catographers are completely broke and unable to pay the bill for the repairs on their broken scout ship. With lots of local gangsters after them, they decide to steal their ship from the dock and make a desperate blind jump to escape the pursuing plice, all the way from the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim of the galaxy. Hopefully they won't be killed by getting too close to any gravitational fields from stars near their path and get killed, in which case they could sell the safe route they discovered to the navigator guild. Assuming it leads to a place that anyone might want to go to.

The good news: They actually survive the jump and don't get blown up in hyperspace. The bad news: The planet they arrive it is Korriban. The tomb world of the Sith. And as it happens, they arrive right during the funeral of Markar Ragnos, the previous Dark Lord of the Sith. The funeral is conducted by the sith lord Ludo Kressh, and arriving fashionably late and bursting in right in the middle of the ceremonies is the other powerful lord Naga Sadow. Kressh and Sadow are the main contenders for the position of Dark Lord and having had enough of Sadow's antics, Kressh challenges him to a duel to the death, right there and now. Though in the middle of the fight the spirit of Markar Ragnos appears between them and orders them to stand down, because he is sensing a great crisis approaching for the sith empire and the need for a strong unified leadership.
At that moment the two scouts, Gav and Jori, land their ship right next to them to say hi. And on order of Ludo Kressh are immediately arrested. The sith lords start debating what they should do and there are two main position. Ludo Kressh believes that the two strangers are scouts of a hostile power from somewhere else in the galaxy and that they need to be immediately killed before they can send word of the existance and location of the Sith Empire. Naga Sadow believes that instead this is a perfect opportunity to find new world for the Sith Empire to conquer, as they have already control over all the systems they know about and apparently have no means to find any interesting target outside their corner of the galaxy. He thinks that the crisis that Ragnos warned about is about the sith getting lazy and weak and that they need this opportunity for new expansion to regain their former strength.

In Empress Teta's palace, Odan-Urr has a vision that warns him that the Dark Jedi who have been banished thousands of years ago to the Outer Rim are not completely gone and that they will soon return in great force to be a major threat to the Republic. He shares his vision with the other Jedi and the Empress and the two agree that the Republic must be warned.

Naga Sadow decides to secretly rescue the two scouts from Ludo Kressh's dungeons and has his warriors kill any witness to leave no trace. To prevent their knowledge of the Republic being lost, he takes Jori to his castle on the sith capital word Ziost while Gav is hidden on his secret main base on the moon. Ludo Kressh believe the Republic has rescued the two and assuming that their location has been discovered, the sith lords decide to chose Naga Sadow as the new Dark Lord to lead them in war.

On Coruscant, the senators are not at all impressed by Empress Teta's claim that one of her Jedi had a vision about an invasion in the near future and they leave without accomplishing their goals. But the Empress Teta system just had a big civil war and still a huge, well trained military, so she is going to take things into her own hands.

On Ziost, Jori tells Naga Sadow that she can not return home without the data in the nav computer of her ship and he promises to get the ship from Ludo Kressh's castle. He sends another group of his warriors to get the ship and make it look like another attack by the Republic, but leaves behind one of his soldiers insignia on purpose. Ludo Kressh finds it and is outraged that Naga Sadow would secretly work with the Republic spies. He conspires with other sith lords to remove the Dark Lord for his betrayal of the Sith Empire and they take their fleets to attack the castle of Naga Sadow.
In the castle, Sadow tells Jori that they have been discovered and that she has to flee now and take her ship back to Republic Space. There isn't any time to get her brother, who is currently learning sith magic on the secret moon base. Once Jori successfully made the jump into hyperspace, Sadow gives order to his own fleet to come from their hiding spot behind the moon to attack the ship of Ludo Kressh while at the same time officers on the other ships kill the other sith lords that were part of the conspiracy against the Dark Lord. Ludo Kresh has no other option than to take his fleet and try to escape, leaving Naga Sadow in full control of the Sith Empire without any challengers. And of course, he had a transmitter put on Jori's ship before she left for the Empress Teta system.

I am really surprised. This one is actually not bad! I wouldn't call it great in any way, but this is actually some degree of good. It's a huge improvement over the previous series. There is a plot. There are characters who have motivations and who do something. There is a villain with a big plan. And a big space battle. It doesn't really have heroes and is all about the villains, but other than that, this is a lot more like Star Wars than the previous story. And while I am not a fan of the art style, it also is several steps up from what there has been before.
I remember that when I first read the comics, I thought the prequels where much worse than the original series, but looking at them a second time now, these are really a lot better.

The plot has plenty of holes, but not terribly big ones. If Naga Sadow's warriors where able to steal the ship from Ludo Kressh's hangar they should also be able to get the navigational data and the location of the Empress Teta system from the nav computer. Sending Jori back with a transmitter was completely unnecessary.

But what I found quite amazing is that Naga Sadow is basically pulling an Order 66 a decade before Revenge of the Sith. First he lures out his enemies to attack him and when he has them all out in the open he gives a signal to his agents to murder them. Hiding the main fleet on the other side of the moon is of course from Return of the Jedi. It's not amazing writing, but it's still some real effort and it mostly works pretty well.
To people interested in the lore of the ancient sith and the Old Republic, I would actually recommend reading this one.

russdm

2016-01-30, 11:29 PM

What I remember most is that the story of Naga Sadow's escape from Korriban/Ziost/the Sith Empire, completely contradicts what shows up in the holocron story that Exar Kun is watching when we are introduced to Exar. It happens to be pretty jarring to see Naga referred to simply as a Sith Sorcerer, who is fleeing from apparently losing some kind of fight against other Sith lords, versus the Naga Sadow who happens to be in charge of the Sith Empire after Marko Ragnos. (Marko shows up a couple of times, and also appears in both Knights of the Old Republic video games, and the Jedi Academy game as the end boss in sort-of fashion)

(OOPS!!! Sadow's escape is a spoiler. Sorry people, don't jump do my throat)

JCarter426

2016-01-31, 01:59 AM

I see. That one somehow gets always overlooked and not referenced by any other works. It's almost being treated as a different continuity from the EU.
It is a different continuity. The early Expanded Universe materials were (or maybe still are) labeled with a different level of canon in the Holocron continuity database. Essentially it was all considered non-canon until referenced by something of a higher level canon.

Ostensibly this was because there was no systematic effort to maintain a continuity back then. There are continuity issues; one notable example is that Jabba the Hutt looked like this (http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/0/09/JabbaHut.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130922022433) before 1983. And don't make me mention the talking bunny rabbit.

But I don't really believe that reason. Early Expanded Universe writers have commented on the licensing process and it sounds no different than how it is today, except in size. It's more like everybody decided to ignore the old canon, or forgot about it entirely, and created a new one starting roughly with Heir to the Empire, and solidified through series like Tales of the Jedi.

I've heard an anecdote that Timothy Zahn was given copies of West End's Star Wars Roleplaing Game as reference material. When I first heard that I thought wow, that's cool... these old sourcebooks from the 80s actually had a hand in building the Expanded Universe... if you look through it, you might see a lot of familiar names. But now what I get out of that story is they probably sent him only the Star Wars Roleplaying Game because they were ignoring Marvel Star Wars and the existing Expanded Universe in favor Zahn's job. I don't mean that as a criticism... I think there are very good reasons to chuck away old continuity sometimes, and a lot of Marvel Star Wars does not... fit in with what came after it, for the most part.

At some point Marvel Star Wars was noticed again, though... perhaps because people who grew up reading Marvel Star Wars started writing for Star Wars. And it sort of became trendy to reference it. In addition to Lumiya and the rest mentioned above, the Zeltron and Nagai species and the Tarkin superweapon were other elements that made it into the later Expanded Universe, and there are a number of vague references to the storylines. One of my favorites describes an incident involving a princess and "some blonde guy with a pink rodent on his shoulder" (http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/41/PlifArrives.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20070411062208). But a lot of material was left in a state of superposition between canon and non-canon just as the Expanded Universe as a whole is now.

And just to make it weirder, Zeltrons are still canon. In some ways the whole thing with Disney is not a huge deal. Star Wars has always had a murky canon with elements shifting in and out of it.

As for Tales of the Jedi, well... I read it back in the day when it was released in trade paperbacks, and then I reread it when it was released in Omnibus format, which I now realize was much longer ago than I thought. I was not as big a fan of it as I was of other material from the same time, such as the Crimson Empire and Dark Forces series, and there are some elements in it, I feel, that don't... fit in with what came after it. But I'm still a fan of the era, and I have a lot of respect for the series and its creators for what Tales of the Jedi was in its time. It was something new. It didn't have Luke or Leia or Han or Vader or anyone else we already knew already knew. It didn't have X-wings and TIE fighters and Star Destroyers and the Millennium Falcon. It wasn't about the Empire and the Rebels. It brought new material. It showed old material in a new light, exploring the history of the Jedi, the Sith, the Mandalorians, and the Republic. In that, it accomplished what a lot of later stories never attempted. And I think that's why it had the impact it did on the later continuity.

Yora

2016-01-31, 06:11 AM

Headcanon is the only true canon. :smallbiggrin:

The KotOR galaxy is indeed in many ways a semi-separate sub-setting. It is Star Wars, but a distinctively different type of Star Wars. Which actually is a major part in why I love it so much. I love the classic movies but mostly I was not a huge fan of always getting more stories about Luke, Leia, and Han. Aside from Heir to the Empire, my favorite novels are the X-Wing ones, in which the movie heroes are almost completely absent. And the games Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight. New stories with new characters generally feel more interesting and exciting for me. New adventures of Luke Skywalker always have a faint air of fan fiction or fan service to me.

Another nice thing, that makes the KotOR era different, is that Jedi, Dark Jedi, and Sith are all plentiful. Admittedly the Clone Wars era also has lots of Jedi and lots of unofficial Sith apprentices, but I am not a fan of those stories for several different reasons. What I also find appealing is that the KotOR era is comperatively small and tidy with only a handful of prominent planets and aliens. All the other planets and aliens exist of course, but rarely appear in any way, so effectively it's a much smaller galaxy. And there is much less backstory and background details. (At least until TOR, though I never played that.)

Zeltrons are pretty big in the second main arc of the KotOR comic series.

Philistine

2016-02-01, 05:08 AM

Yora

2016-02-01, 10:14 AM

I wouldn't call him a great Star Wars writer in any case.

But please consider that this is after Dark Empire. You have to be a little bit grateful any time a poor Star Wars story manages to at least stay above that level. :smallamused:

Yora

2016-02-02, 05:49 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1331425401l/390090.jpg

Jori makes it back to the Empress Teta system to deliver a warning about the Sith Empire. Why she thinks the Sith are a threat to the Republic after Naga Sadow helped her escape from an attack by Ludo Kressh on his castle wasn't quite clear to me, but she is pretty desperate to reach the Empress. As soon as she arrives at the capital world Cinnagar she is immediately intercepted by space control, arrested by the police, thrown into prison, and her ship confiscated to pay for the damage she and her brother caused during their last flight. She insist on seeing the Empress to tell her about the Sith, but the officers only laugh at that. Her old boss, whom she owed a lot of money, expressed how greatly disappointed he is with her and doesn't want to hear any Sith nonsense either.

Odan-Urr gets a visit from his master, a floating jellyfish in a hovering gas tank, who doesn't contribute anything to the story.

On Ziost, the ship of Ludo Kressh appears and sends a message to all Sith Lords, demanding that they turn against Naga Sadow. The Dark Lord tells Gav to push a button on a console to quiet Ludo Kressh, which he does and it fires the planetary defense guns, destroying the ship. Gav is pretty upset about this.
Now that the matter of Ludo Kressh is dealt with, Naga Sadow plans to invide the Republic. Gav gets told this is because the Republic is terrible to it's people, which he surely knows since he himself was poor and lost his parents and home in a civil war. When the Sith take over it will all be better. He buys that.

Jori gets sentenced to building new colonies for Empress Teta together with lots of prisoners from the civil war. But she really needs to tell the Empress about the Sith, for whatever reason, and has to find a way to escape. She knocks out a guard and runs to an unguarded and unmanned ore transport with an open door. The shuttle easily escapes from the ships in orbit that try to stop her as the transport is faster than the interceptors and heavily armored. She also makes it past the orbital defenses of Cinnagar but is shot down right before landing. She jumps out with a parachute and lands on the walls of the palace. From there it's just a short climb into the private chambers of the Empress.
Seriously? Really? This is the dumbest prision escape and castle infiltration story I've ever seen.
The Empress picks up her spear and calls the guards, being not impressed by this because she's dealt with lots of assassins before. (Really?! Security?! Gah...) But since Odan-Urr has told her about his vision of the Sith and she already tried to warn the Republic herself, she believes Jori's story. The other Jedi with Odan-Urr goes to Corruscant to tell the other Jedi so they can prepare for the invasion.

Naga Sadow takes the entire Sith fleet to the location of Jori's ship, which right now is piloted by a crime boss who she had owed money and who took her ship. Naga Sadow immediately blows it up, telling Gav that sensors said there were no humans on it. He sends half the fleet to dealth with the forces of Empress Teta on Cinnagar and the other half to attack Coruscant. He also makes Gav supreme general of the forces going to Cinnagar. For no reason, as far as I can tell. Maybe he wants to make him his apprentice or something?

On Coruscant the Jedi are fighting some Sith. On Cinnagar the Empress and Odan-Urr are fighting some sith. Gav runs into his old boss and is happy to see him, but the sith warriors just kill him like everyone else. That moment Jori comes around the corner and is devestated that Gav killed the old guy and wants to kill him. Gav runs away in horror of what has happened and Jori runs after him begging him not to abandon her. Make up your mind, woman. Gav takes his shuttle and makes it to his ship and leaves the battle to go to Naga Sadow's command ship from where he is supporting both battles with illusions of additional soldiers and ships. Jori is able to track where the ship went and informs the Empress.
Odan-Urr's master tells some soldiers to stand back and smashes the glass of his tank, causing the toxic gas to kill a lot of Sith soldiers but also dying himself.

Gav tells everyone on the bridge to leave, locks the door, and fires on Naga Sadow's command ship to end this whole invasion. It's severely damaged and the Dark Lord has to stop creating his illusions. At the same time reinforcements arrive at Cinnagar and the Sith troops on the ground are defeated or retreating back to the ships. Naga Sadow pleads with Gav to come over so they can discuss the problems in person. Gav agrees but when he arrives it turns out that at the same time he took his own shuttle to fly to Gav's ship. The fleet of Empress Teta arrives and Naga Sadow creates a powerful sun erruption to cover the retreat of his fleet back to Sith space. Gav is stuck on the damaged command ship and killed by the explosion.

As the remaining fleet of Naga Sadow makes it back to Ziost, they are already awaited by the fleet of Ludo Kressh and both fleets almost annihilate each other with a close victory for the Dark Lord. But then Empress Teta shows up and Naga Sadow accepts he's beaten and has to flee. He orders his last ships to the two stars of the system and creates another big erruption that destroys the rest of the fleet while only his own ship secretly makes it to Yavin 4, where he builds his new stronghold.

The End

Meh, this was noticably less good than The Golden Age of the Sith. Everyone is back to acting stupid, if they are acting at all. There is none of the plotting and deception from the previous comic and just a lot of pretty pointless battle scenes. Odan-Urr's master does nothing at all except to kill himself a minute before the end of the battle. Odan-Urr himself contributes even less. Gav also contributes nothing and is made general for no reason at all. I think now I remember why Knights of the Old Republic seemed to me as an improvement when I read the comics in chronological order the first time.

The only thing I liked was Empress Teta, who is actually kind of a major character here. Clearly the second most important after Naga Sadow, though that's still not much. Aside from Jori's crazy adventure to tell her of the invasion, which she alread knew was coming and preparing for, the Empress does pretty much everything that is happening on the Republic side. While the art is not great, the Empress actually looks beliveable as a warlord who conquered a whole system and destroyed all the other factions as a real military leader and not just some politician who sat in her palace the whole time. Which also makes her believable as the supreme commander on the Republic side.

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/f/f0/Empress_Teta.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/449?cb=20091207033029

This all felt very rushed and didn't have any of the qualities of the previous comic. A total mess and a big disappointment overall.

A year later someone apparently thought that there was still some money to be made with this series and so there was another short series about what happened later to Ulic Qel-Droma. I remember thinking it was pretty stupid last time I've read it. And I am now feeling conflicted whether I should cover it as well or go straight to the next series, where things are finally getting really good and this whole examination of the comics starts to have a purpose! But I also tend to be a completionist and it would only be one more comic. Hm...

russdm

2016-02-02, 06:25 PM

I would say read it because it features Cathar, has some stuff about the difficulty of being a Jedi Parent, and it features some good twilek stuff. There is also stuff about Ulic trying to survive without the Force available to him.

I actually liked Redemption. It feels like a proper closure to the previous series, and it does set up some information that appears in the Knights of the Old Republic comics.

If you want to pass on reading it, just go ahead.

Yora

2016-02-02, 06:28 PM

I think my main problem was the Dark Side revolving door, but other than that I believe it was actually quite different from all the previous comics as characterization and plot go.

russdm

2016-02-02, 06:30 PM

I think my main problem was the Dark Side revolving door, but other than that I believe it was actually quite different from all the previous comics as characterization and plot go.

I don't know of how many of the Dark Side revolving doors I have seen. I know only of a couple times someone came back from the Dark Side. Where was the doors revolving?

JCarter426

2016-02-02, 06:58 PM

The only thing I liked was Empress Teta, who is actually kind of a major character here. Clearly the second most important after Naga Sadow, though that's still not much. Aside from Jori's crazy adventure to tell her of the invasion, which she alread knew was coming and preparing for, the Empress does pretty much everything that is happening on the Republic side. While the art is not great, the Empress actually looks beliveable as a warlord who conquered a whole system and destroyed all the other factions as a real military leader and not just some politician who sat in her palace the whole time. Which also makes her believable as the supreme commander on the Republic side.
Empress Teta is great. That's why they name the system after her.

This all felt very rushed and didn't have any of the qualities of the previous comic. A total mess and a big disappointment overall.
Yeah, that about sums up my feelings for the prequel volumes. We spend all this time with learning about the Sith through Ulic Qel-Droma and Exar Kun, who nearly wipe out the Jedi using what little they manage to learn of the dark side from ancient relics and ghosts... and then we get to see the actual Sith Empire that started it all, that will corrupt Jedi Knights for thousands of years... and they're defeated in, like, a day.

A year later someone apparently thought that there was still some money to be made with this series and so there was another short series about what happened later to Ulic Qel-Droma. I remember thinking it was pretty stupid last time I've read it. And I am now feeling conflicted whether I should cover it as well or go straight to the next series, where things are finally getting really good and this whole examination of the comics starts to have a purpose! But I also tend to be a completionist and it would only be one more comic. Hm...
I say go for it... at least you know the art will be an improvement. But I also remember it being one of the better stories... it's more emotional.

Firstly it's unique in dealing with someone who has lost the Force, a theme which is repeated later with the Exile. But the bigger thing is the characterization. In Tales of the Jedi, for the most part everyone is good or evil because that's just their role in the story. But in Redemption you really get a feel for why everyone is doing the things they do in the story. It's not a simple story of good and evil because we already did that, so now we have a more complicated and poignant epilogue.

Yora

2016-02-03, 01:21 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174082497l/359884.jpg

This story takes place 10 years after The Sith War. Ulic Qel-Droma is looking for a new home and has the pilot Hoggon take him to Yavin 4. But he seems to have bad memories of the place, even though I think he never actually had been there before. So Hoggon takes him to some ruins on some ice planet and Ulic thinks this will do.

Nomi Sunrider has become an important member of the Jedi leadership and calling together all the Jedi from the galaxy for a big conference. What that conference is about or what purpose it has is never established. Her daughter Vima, who never did anything in the previous comics except being carried or dragged along is bored by all the business and wants to learn cool Jedi powers instead.
Silvar shows up and apparently she and Nomi know each other well, though I don't remember them any meeting in the other comics. Which I read just a week ago. She's always angry and thinks someone should find Ulic so they can kill him.

Tott Doneta is on Ryloth and helps his tribe crossing the desert to find new caves for their camp. Completely irrelevant to the story. I assume it's just to remind us who this character is. Who never did anything other than calming a wild animal on Onderon in the very first comic.

Vima sunrider is bored and steals one of the gas mining ships from the space station where the conference takes place. And immediately drives it straight into the sun but fortunately Tott Doneta is arriving with his ship at just that moment to pick up her escape pod. Her mother is disappointed, but fortunately nothing bad happened. Except for the theft and destruction of a million credit spaceship, but that#s not something heroes have to worry about in a comic like this.

As the conference goes on Vima is still bored and decides to go and find Ulic so he can be her Jedi Master while her mother is always occupied with administration stuff. So she just hops on some random ship which turns out to be the one of Hoggon. She tells him she's a Jedi and looking for Ulic and shows him a picture she's taken from her mother, which makes Hoggon realize who ha had been transporting previously. He's a huge Jedi fanboy who knows everything about the Sith War, but apparently had never seen any pictures of Ulic. He drops Vima off at the ice planet and leaves. Vima finds Ulic, tells him she wants him to teach her, and he refuses. Then a snow storm arrives and Ulic can't just have her freeze to death, so he lets her stay.

Meanwhile Silvar is constantly pissed and Tott Doneta offers her to come with him to Ryloth to help the Twi'leks of his tribe. When they arrive they hear that the tribe is once more in a war with another tribe and Tott decides to go visit their leaders and negotiate a peace. Silvar stays behind at the camp and thinks peace is stupid and tells the Twi'leks that they should all grab their axes and picks and go to the other tribe and slaughter them all. Fortunately Tott comes back that moment and tells everyone that he's arranged a peace agreement. Silvar still thinks that this is a totally stupid way to deal with conflict and wants to go to her homeworld instead and Tott comes with her.

On the cathar homeworld Silvar turns out to be super famous and some old shaman tells her that she really needs to deal with her agression. She agrees and has the perfect solution. Go into the desert and kill a big animal. She and Tott go to the cave of a big swarm of giant insects and Silvar butchers them all. Tott doesn't feel happy about her hacking apart their corpses and thinks this didn't work. Later Silvar comes up with a new plan and goes to the savannah, find another big animal, and kills it to. Somehow that still didn't work in helping her with her agression. Who would have thought? She almost kills a messenger who informs her that Nomi wants to see her because Vima is missing and she returns back to the station.

Ulic finally agrees to teach Vima some things he still remembers, even though he has no Force Powers left at all. And they make giant ice sculptures with their lightsabers.

Hoggon arrives at the station about the same time as Silvar and tells her that he knows where Ulic is and that Vima is with him. So they grab Nomi and all head to the ice planet. As they arrive Silvar knows exactly what she needs to do to deal with her agression. Kill Ulic! She quickly finds him and they start fighting, and Ulic admits that he has done terrible thing but he didn't anything to Silvar's husband and it was completely his own fault that he went with Exar Kun and learned Dark Side powers before he was killed during Exar Kun's assassination of Aleema. Silvar admits that this is true and stops fighting. Hoggon somehow sees that as an opportunity to shot Ulic in the back with a blaster and he dies. And then disappears into nothing.

The End.

Thank the makers!

Yes, as a comic this was much better than most in this series. It's almost decent. It has actual characters and when they talk they are actually saying thing. And I think there wasn't really any narration in boxes, nor overly forced monologues. It's still a terrible story.
I hate that Ulic went full Dark Side, then lost all his powers, and the moment he dies he becomes a force ghost. That's reserved for pure Jedi Masters and the very notable exception of Darth Vader who supposedly was an exceptionally unique case of coming back from the Dark Side.
I hate that Silvar acts like a Dark Jedi the entire time and nobody has any problem with that other than telling her she should learn to reduce her anger. And then she immediately drops all of that in a matter of three or four sentences after hearing one good argument why Ulic is not to blame for one of the thousands or millions of people who died in the Sith War.
And I hate that Vima can just steal and destroy a spaceship with no consequences and that she runs off to find a man everyone hates and fears to be her master because her mother doesn't give her enough attention.

It's a lot better written than the previous comics, but it's still a really bad story. Darth Vader turning back from the Dark Side was meant to be a unique and completely unexpected event. We can't have every Jedi who starts good and then turns evil come back in the end. Really? Who ever started out as a hero in a story and went to the dark side without coming back? The only one I can think of is Malak, but that was because he started as a big bad sith lords first and had the story of his noble youth added later.
This story is a big pile of sappy cliches. I don't like it. It only looks good in comparison to the rest of the Tales of the Jedi series.

Which I now finally have completed! Yay!
Now we can actually get to the good stuff.

russdm

2016-02-03, 05:41 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174082497l/359884.jpg

Silvar shows up and apparently she and Nomi know each other well, though I don't remember them any meeting in the other comics. Which I read just a week ago. She's always angry and thinks someone should find Ulic so they can kill him.

They meet when Sylvar's mate Crado went with Oss to kill Master Thon, when Exar Kun sent his turned Jedi out to kill Jedi Masters. Crado joined up with Exar Kun, goes to Thon's planet, then gets the Hssiss to attack Thon. The attack fails, Sylvar shows up and duels Crado, who she claws, giving him a scar like she gave Exar. Thon disables Oss.

Sylvar meets Nomi in the aftermath. It takes place after Ulic's trial and Exar retrieving Ulic. Sylvar heads out to Thon's place, or shows up in time to thwart the attack. Sylvar goes on to blame Ulic and Exar for following Exar.

Exar, disappointed in Crado, sends him to help Aleema employ the weapon that kills her. Aleema realizes that Ulic is punishing her, while Crado doesn't understand.

Then the evacuation of Ossus has to happen.

Yora

2016-02-04, 07:30 PM

Now we get to the good part where all the fun begins!

Knights of the Old Republic is a comic series that ran for 50 issues from 2006 to 2010. It's based heavily on the world shown in the videogame Knights of the Old Republic and started just two months after the release of KotOR2. I never played the second game, but given the short space between the releases and the complexity of the comic story and the fact that the comic takes place a few years before the first game, I am assuming that the second game's influence on the comic is very minor.
I actually have no idea how I ended up learning about the series in the first place, as I've never really read any Star Wars comics and had not following new Star Wars publications for a long time. I think I probably saw some images of it somewhere and got intrigued by the look, though I really don't remember. But the info that I found about it made it sound really good. So I think about 3 or 4 years ago I got Tales of the Jedi first to have the full story, and back then I actually really liked it. Didn't hold up on second reading, though. I am hoping this will not be the case with this one.
There was actually another short series of 5 issues in late 2012, almost three years after the main series had originally ended, but from everything I can find about it it seems to be considered pretty poor and unpopular. I am probably not going to cover that one.

But now the fun part. In case anyone has not read the series yet and just reading this out of curiosity, this post is purely about the first volume without any spoilers what comes later. Because I think it really is that good that even a summary should convince people to read the whole thing themselves. But for everyone still on the fence or really not interested of reading the comics, here we go:

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1331425720l/35427.jpg

It's 30 years after the Sith War and as far as everyone is able to tell the Sith have been defeated for good. (I am assuming this means the Dark Jedi aristocracy is extinct, though the common sith workers and warriors should probably be still around without leadership.) However, the Mandalorians have recovered well from their defeat at Onderon and resumed their campaign of conquest on the outer edges of the Republic. Even now the Republic Navy is not able to effectively deal with them (the Sith War was primarily faught by the personal fleet of Empress Teta) and Taris is considered to be one of the key systems in the region.

Zayne Carrick is a Jedi apprentice on the city planet Taris and trying to catch the fence Gryph, some kind of furry goblin-pig alien. He uses a disguise to get close to him under the pretense of trying to sell stolen ammunition from the Republic Navy. He grabs Gryph but forgot his handcufs in his speeder and while he is rumaging around for it Gryph presses some buttons that cause the speeder to drive off and dragging Zayne with it over the edge of the roof. He gets caught by another Jedi named Squint who was just passing by, right in time to save his life. Squint says he has come to Taris to ask the local Jedi Masters to join him and his master on their mission to help fighting the Mandalorians, against the wishes of the Jedi Council. (Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge. Players of the first game should easily figure out who he and his master are.) Zayne would love to help support their cause but tells Squint that there is little hope that the masters would join him or allow any of the apprentices to go.

At the very same time the Miraluka master Q'Anilia is having a vision that the fate of the future has just significantly changed in several ways. The other masters things that it's time they have to do something about it.

The next day Zayne tries to catch Gryph again at one of his warehouses, but his skill with the Force is so bad that he fails once more and ends up crashing through a window in the small Jedi academy established on the planet. By this point the masters are not really surprised anymore and Zayne's master Lucien Draay orders him to deal with the landlord about the repairs of the damage his entrance caused while they are preparing for the ceremony in which their successful apprentices will be made knights. The Jedi masters are having a discussion about their plans and Lucien tells the others that he has recieved a message from Coruscant and they will go through with it as planned. Master Xamar wants to know what exactly the message said but Lucien tells him unmistakenly that everything is in order.

While the dealing with the landlord drag on, Zayne spots Gryph on the street outside the broken window and once more rushes after him, trying to catch him. Even though it takes a while Zayne eventually succeeds and leaves Gryph handcuffed to his speeder while he rushes back into the academy and hopefully make it before the ceremony is over. And as he enters the main hall he finds the five masters with their lightsabers and the other four students dead on the floor. Master Lucien tries to get Zayne as well, but with amazing luck he manages to flee back to his speeder and escape, with all five masters in pursuit. And we've just started with issue #2.

After a crazy chase Zayne and Gryph manage to hide in a trash compactor and shake the masters. But already Zayne is publically wanted by the local police with big holos of his face all over the city. And of Gryph as well, so they are now both stuck in the same boat. Gryph wonders if perhaps the masters are really Sith, but Zayne says that's impossible because the masters always hated the Sith. Though he admits that hating going against the ways of the Jedi and that there's definitly something foul there. They get a ride on a cart with trash and on the route Gryph left a trail of clues that leads to the entrance of the Undercity. Though he has very little hope that the police is going to be dumb enough to try to follow them down there. And especially not the Jedi masters. Cue the Jedi Masters fighting a horde of ravenous mutants. After an encounter with a swoop gang, which Gryph tricks into fighting the Wookie salvage traders who were giving them a ride, the two arrive at a junk yard in the lowest parts of the city, where Gryph hopes to find someone he knows and might be able to help.

They run into Jarael, an Arkanian woman who badly beats Zayne up with her stun staff because she wants him to leave immediately before the police starts coming to the area. She's also pissed that a slaughter of Jedi apprentices was the final straw that made the few remaining big companies pack up their stuff and pulling out of Taris, with the whole Mandalorian Crusade approaching. She's the bodyguard of Camper, an old Arkanian man with pretty severe dementia who still seems to be a pretty good mechanic and build smuggling containers for Gryph, which they might use to get off the planet. While Gryph is still trying to convince Camper to help them, the masters arrive with a team of police. Jarael and Camper panic and it turns out that their shack is really an old salvage ship burried under a pile of trash. They make it into space, but in good Star Wars fashion the whole power system breaks down.

Camper manages to restore at least some power which allows them to hide in the ring of asteroids that surrounds the planet. Jarael and Gryph have a big argument about him and Zayne ruining everything for the Arkanians with the who Jedi murdering business and Zayne gets really stressed by constantly having to remind everyone that he didn't do it. Camper almost passes out from all the activity and so everyone agrees to take some rest and get the ship back running tomorrow. Zayne sneaks to the communications console and contacts the Jedi masters at the new main Jedi Temple on Dantooine to tell them about the other apprentices having been killed by their masters. The masters on Dantooine have great doubts about that story and while they believe Zayne's honesty, they think it's more likely that his own mind is not working right as he's never really been able to control the Force. They suggest that he should try to reach the next nearby Jedi Consular, whose special powers as telepaths and seers might be able to get his mind back under control. To their surprise, not only is there one of them right on Taris, but it's even four of them. Those four who just murdered their apprentices. But just before they can continue their conversation Jarael comes in the room and knocks Zayne out with her stun staff to stop him from giving away their position.

As Zayne wakes up again he pieces together that the masters started to act strangely right after the apprentices had their final test on the Rogue Moon in the asteroid field, so he think that something important must have happened while they were away for the test. Because the Rogue Moon moves through the asteroid field in the opposite direction than the ring, it's constantly hailed with impacts and the apprentices had to find their way across the surface while relying only on the Force to find a safe path without being crushed. Zayne and Jarael go down in space suits to look at the place where the masters had landed their ship under a shield and he remembers that their loading droid LB got destroyed while the masters had been waiting for them to finish their test. LB might have seen what the masters had been doing while waiting and Zayne finds his remains at the edge of a cliff. But with the low gravity on the moon the fall could not have destroyed a heavy loading droid. Someone must have crushed him on the ground, probably with the Force.

Just then the Master Lucien shows up with the police but Camper and Gryph arrive with the ship, destroy the police shuttle, and pick up Zayne, Jarael, and the remains of LB to disappear back into the asteroid field. Camper fixes LB but his main processor was so badly damage that he had to fix it with parts from a protocol droid which now gives the gorified forklift the ability to speak and argue. He also got a new holo projector which allows him to project a recording of the last things he saw before he was destroyed:
While they are waiting for their apprentices to finish their test, the four seers start to meditate to see into the future. Raana Tey sees herself on Taris, being killed during a Mandalorian invasion. Feln sees himself back on his homeworld where he sees himself killed with a lightsaber by a figure in red. Xamar has a vision of being with the Republic Fleet while they are being betrayed and killed by their own ships. Q'Anilia is on Coruscant, being to late to save someone from a person in red. Raana and Q'Anilia are certain that the Sith are returning. And they all agree that at the center of the vision is a person in a red space suit. The same as the apprentices are currently wearing. Raana says they should kill them all immediately, but Xamar cautions that visions are always unclear and the future shifting and insists that they check with Coruscant before they do anything rash. Lucien gives in and says he'll send a message, though he already knows what the answer will be. Since secrecy is important, Lucien turns around and destroys LB.

LB doesn't take it well and starts acting up and Camper shuts him down. Turns out that unfortunately the new AI components he installed couldn't handle the replay of its own destruction and formated the memory, conveniently erasing all the proof Zayne would have that the masters killed the apprentices. Right that moment a ship of bounty hunters show up. After some negotiating Gryph gets a deal that their ship will be released and Gryph, Jarael, and Camper can go, but the bounty hunters are not giving up Zayne. During the night Zayne escapes from his cell and tries to steal Campers ship from the hangar, but is stoped by Jarael who gives him a speech about ruining everything for her and Camper. They had a nice hiding spot until Zayne showed up and ruined everything and now he has the audacity to also steal their ship. Zayne gives up and allows himself to be taken to Taris by the bounty hunters.

Zayne's capture is big on the news, right after a report of Jedi losing a battle against the Mandalorians, with Squint from the very beginning being seen getting captured in the background. Among the crowed that welcomes him and the captain of the bounty hunters are also the sister and the little brother of one of the dead apprentices, who of course believe Zayne murdered their brother. He is taken to the Jedi Masters ("Jedi Business") and the captain said that they found him alone with no trace of the others who helped him escape. Which Q'Anilia of course sees through immediately. Lucien admits freely that Zayne didn't kill the other apprentices and that Zayne was not acting under some kind of delusion. Lucien then tells the captain what really happened. And as far as I am able to tell for really no reason at all. But this stuff needs to be told to the readers. When Zayne's best friend Shad arrived fourth for the ceremony he noticed that the masters had not put their lightsabers on the stand at the door, as it was custom in the academy hall. They tell him that this is part of the ceremony. And since Lucien had his lightsaber as well, this means that Zayne must be made a knight as well. The apprentices are happy and can't believe it. And now that he thinks about it, Shad really doesn't believe it. As much as they all like Zayne, they all know he's not able to be a Jedi and Shane senses that the masters' excuses are lies. The bluff is up and the masters kill the unarmed apprentices even though Zayne is still not there.

The bounty hunter really doesn't care about any of this. Of course he knows too much and Lucien kills him with his lightsaber. Then they plan to take his shuttle, go to the bounty hunter ship, and kill all the other bounty hunters and the people who helped Zayne escape from Taris. He's about to kill Zayne when the roof explodes and Jarael jumps down with his space suit and lightsaber, giving the masters a sudden scare. Before the masters can get their lightsabers from the stand at the door, Zayne throws them all out the hole in the wall and Jarael grabs him and jetpacks out of the academy hall. Since he let himself be captured to allow her and Camper to escape they can't really leave him to be executed.
They run to Campers ship and as they depart Lucien shouts to Zayne that he better remember to always fear what he might still very well become. To which Zayne reminds him that fear leads to the Dark Side.

This is sooo much better than Tales of the Jedi was even at it's high points. This is really good. There are only 8 years between the two series and they still feel like they are from completely different eras. Not only is the art not nearly as shoddy, the quality of the writing is worlds better! There are real characters, there is real plot, real dialogues. This comic is not the pinacle of western literature, but when you compare it with TotJ it looks like the work of experienced professionals instead of what two 8 year olds produced on one saturday afternoon.

I like Zayne. I like Gryph. Jarael is a bit of a "mean woman" at this point and hyper-tough, but I also like her as well. Not too much of a fan of Lucien Draay with his short blond hair, ultra wide shoulders, and white and gold robe, in addition to being a total ****; but he works as an effective antagonist. The other Jedi masters still had very little to say, and that was almost entirely limited to Xamar and Q'Anilia, of who we don't really know anything yet.

This one book has more plot than the entire TotJ series combined. And it's a great mystery. With Zayne being on the run and having to hide with the help of a scoundrel the story is a real adventure and exciting. It's not just a good Star Wars story, I think it's actually one of the best starts for any Star Wars story. We now have a motive for the antagonists, but from having read the whole series before I know that there's a lot more to their unusually rash decision to murder all their students because of a single vague vision. I love it, this is wonderful. And it has barely scratched the surface of the greater story.

Kantaki

2016-02-05, 08:56 AM

Gryph and Zayne are always a highlight. One is a greedy smalltime criminal, the other is a unlucky Jedi apprentice. They get in trouble.:smallbiggrin:
One of my favorite moments is from the Vector-storyline. While fleeing from a massive horde of Rakghoul-mutants, after running through a giant explosion they end up at a dead-end. This is the resulting dialogue: "The door! The door! The door doesn't open! The door doesn't open!" "Because it is a wall, Gryph!" Then there is the fact that they are in this situation because they got kicked out by the outcasts...

The incident with the swoop-gang and the wookies was pretty good too. Gryph tells two gang-members that the wookies he and Zayne are travelling with are transporting Spice. "How could you do that? They helped us!" "And we helped them. Once they dealt with those guys they own two new swoops."

Yora

2016-02-05, 10:52 AM

One of my first reactions to start reading the series again was surprise about the high amount of jokes. Particularly the first few chapters have at least one or two obvious jokes in the open on every single page. Though I think that dropped down significantly as the story progressed and got more grim, and I think it probably was overloaded with humor at the start for that very purpose.

But there's a lot of great lines that clearly have a certain humorous quality but also manages to say something more profound than just quick slapstick jokes. There's a moment where Zayne whines about everything going down the drain and Jarael tells him "I would say 'welcome to my life'. But then you showed up and destroyed it!"

Kantaki

2016-02-05, 11:36 AM

I think that's why I liked the story so much. A young Jedi allying with a criminal to prove his innocence while being hunted by a secret group withhin the Order? That could be a dark and "serious" story. Instead we get Zayne* and Gryph, who really can't be accused of being competent or overly serious. Not that the other cast members are much better (on the seriousness front, I can only think of two guys who beat them when it comes to competence)- in almost every situation there is someone who has to get sarcastic. And despite this the story doesn't turn into a pure joke.

I think it is much like the Order of the Stick in that regard. Yes, the presentation is rather humorous, yes, the cast can bet silly from time to time, yes, there is still a serious story-line, no, the darker moments usually don't last.

*How did one character phrase it? Something along the lines of "The only way you could have killed someone is in a freak-accident."

Yora

2016-02-11, 09:34 AM

I just noticed something: Who is that second person on the cover of Commencement? The guy with the yellow lightsaber is certainly meant to be Zayne. Because Zayne has a yellow lightsaber and that's the full extent of visual similarity to any character in the story.
But who is that other person? There isn't any character in that book that would look somewhat similar or appears in a similar situation.

BWR

2016-02-11, 10:00 AM

Yora

2016-02-13, 04:19 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403203080l/405713.jpg

This story begins on some minor planet in the Outer Rim near Taris with Zayne sneaking into a small mining camp disguised as a refugee from the Mandalorians looking for food. The miners are getting a fake alarm call from Jarael disguised as Master Q'Anilia, who is telling them the Mandalorians are attacking, and with a little mental nudge from Zayne they buy it, race to their ships, and fly off. Gryph and Camper show up with the ship to steal supplies from the abandoned camp while Jarael keeps playing around with Zayne's lightsaber in an uncharacteristic cheerful way. And just as they finish loading up the ship, an actual Mandalorian invasion force sweeps over the mining camp.
The Mandalorians capture Jarael who had not been keeping attention and the others have to retreat to the ship and recue her later. Zayne is fighting with one of the Mandalorian leaders, when he suddendly jumps past Zayne with his jetpack to steal their ship. But the remaining gang just manages to get up the ramp before he takes of with the ship. Camper and LB are doing a surprisingly good job at taking out the Mandalorian and putting him in one of the scan shielded cargo boxes. However, Camper has some kind of bug on Jarael and goes to Hyperspace following after the Mandalorian ship that is transporting her.

We also get a short scene with Captain Karath, who looks completely different than in the game. Fortunately, as the game model was absolutely awful.
The Mandalorian offers to help them rescue their friend if they let him out, as he's certain the ship will be immediately destroyed when they reach Mandalorian space if he doesn't get them past the guards. His name is Rohlan Dyre and he's not a fan of the new Mandalore who took over after the defeat at Onderon. This campaign against remote border worlds of the Republic with all the sneaking around and avoiding open battle is not the Mandalorian way and he has no desire to fight for the Mandalore without knowing what the whole purpose of it is. We get a short look of him without his helm on, which I think is one of only two moments where he does that, and he looks a lot like Roger Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon.
Jarael is taken to Flashpoint Station, on a tiny planet where the sun burns the entire surface during the one hour long day and landing and leaving is only possible during the short night when the shield can be lowered. The station is used by the Mandalorian doctor Demagol to experiment on captured Jedi in the hope of finding something that can make the Mandalorians better warriors. Here Jarael meets Squint again, who know has lost all his hair.

The Jedi Masters return to Corruscant and try to see Lucien's mother in their family palace, but the droid at the door turns him away, saying that he will be contacted later. Q'Anilia is amazed that she doesn't want to see them immediately. Krynda Draay was one of the students of Master Vodo Siosk-Bas during the Sith War and her sister and husband died when Exar Kun betrayed them. She is half Miraluka and has taken in a lot of young Jedi seers, a lot of them Miraluka, including Q'Anilia. Lucien has almost no power in seeing the future and is instead trained by Haazen, one of Master Vodo's students who was never made a Jedi knight.
They visit the Jedi Council where they have a short encounter with Revan, who had an audience right before them. The masters of the council are very disappointed with their performance, especially about the loss of all their students. Lucien agrees with the council that the Mandalorians are not their business, and that instead they really have to find the Sith Lords that are certainly still controling them. The council doesn't want to hear any of that either and instead sends all five of them to new appointments.
Lucien meets with Haazen and it turns out that he did not get confirmation for his descision to kill the students but instead had been explicitly ordered to bring them all to Coruscant. While they both work for Lucien's mother, they don't cooperate at all. Haazen looks a lot like Darth Vader taken out of his armor and having put on the Emperor's Robe. Which of course isn't good.

On Flashpoint Rohlan sends a message to the guards of the station that he's got another Jedi to deliver to Demagol, while Gryph and Camper hide in the smuggling compartment. Rohlan talks Demagol in taking Zayne straight to his lab and together they easily knock out the doctor. Zayne takes Demagols armor and Rohlan distracts the guard while Zayne uses the Force to place some explosives Gryph had taken from the mining camp. Gryph calls the station wearing a Republic officer uniform and tells the Mandalorians that the Republic has mined the station and is going to blow it up unless the Mandalorians leave. They refuse and he blows up the shield generator, leaving less than a hour to leave the planet before sunrise. He also blows up one of the stolen Republic ships on the landing pad, so the Mandalorians all rush to their own ships while Zayne runs back inside the station shouting he has to rescue his research, and Rohlan stays behind.
Zayne gets back into his own clothes and released Jarael and all the Jedi prisoners, Rohlan goes to take care of Demagol. Squint gets the old red spacesuit that Zayne wore on the Rogue Moon and Jarael when she rescued him from the masters on Taris. He also mentions that he thinks Squint is a silly nickname and he'd rather be called Alek. Rohlan puts the knocked out scientist back into his armor and hands him over to the Jedi to be delivered to the Republic as a valuable prisoner. Then he sneaks back on Campers ship, hiding himself in the smuggling compartment.

Next, Jarael and Camper go to a banking planet to get money from one of Gryphs account by convincing the bank that it was mistakenly locked due to mistaken identity with the wanted criminal Marn Hierogryph. Jarael says her name is Chantique, a name that shows up again much, much later. They are followed by two very stupid Ithorian bounty hunters. Being back to her old charming self, Jarael starts a fight with them and beats them up easily, so the Ithorians grab the banker they were talking to and run away with him. Zayne leaves the ship to help them and it turns out the banker is his father.

The Ithorians are the Moomo Brothers Dob and Del, who are hilariously incompetent and I think completely inapropriate for the story. They are like Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler playing bounty hunters. As Gryph describes them, "Ithorians manage to always stay so calm and peaceful because they throw people like the Moomos out." They had been hired by Master Raana to watch Zayne's father in case Zayne might show up so they could capture him. Kidnapping his father has absolutely no purpose and ruined the whole plan.
Gryph finds one of the two in a bar nearby and tells him he got Zayne and wants to exchange him for his father. Zayne follows him, rescues his father, and tells him to go to the Jedi Academy on Dantooine, as Master Vandar is one of the few people Zayne trusts. His father has just been transfered to this planet, shortly after the Draay family has become one of the owners of his bank, together with Adascacorp and Czerka Corp.

Well, this starts pretty good and ends pretty poorly. That entire portion on the banking planet has barely anything happening and what happens is pretty dumb. The parts with the Jedi Masters and the Mandalorians are better, but there's also not a lot happening. We get to know Rohlan and Demagol and Krynda Draay and Haazen, who have some kind of conspiracy going on.
A good amount of name dropping here. Adascacorp and Chantique are completely meaningless names at this point, but pretty important later on in the story. Having Revan show up for one page didn't really contribute anything, but Squint/Alek is the main character among his followers with whom the heroes have interaction.

The first four parts advance the story without having any great moments, while the last two were pretty much a waste of time. Not only is it padding, it is also very stretched out padding with close to no substance.

(There is a setup for a really nice "I am your father" moment towards the end of the series here, but wel'll talk about that when we get there in part 8 or so. :smallwink:)

Kantaki

2016-02-13, 05:29 PM

:smallbiggrin: The Moomo brothers- the answer on the question „What is worse than Jar Jar Binks?”:smallbiggrin: Not the last time we see them I fear.:smallamused:
Maybe the part on Telerath didn't do much for the plot as whole, but it continues the theme of the first part- the gang needs resources- and it shows some hints of Zayne „the force has a sense of humour” Carrick’s special relationship with the force. At least I think so. I mean the gang’s presence just happens to throw a wrench into Raana’s plan to get Zayne over his family- by the way, very jedi-like? That seems like a odd coincidence. Not that those exist. (I think Gryph and Zayne even comment Zayne’s... luck at one point)

My favorite bit of Gryph/Zayne in this one interaction is:
„Why would Camper call me a rat?”
„Well, he does know you longer than anyone else Gryph. That’s only normal.”
„Yes, I think you are...”
beat
„You aren't irreplaceable either, you know.”
„Without this thought I wouldn't get through the day.”

Yora

2016-02-13, 05:49 PM

Gryph immediately thinks kidnapping Zayne's father is a trap by the masters and while Zayne agrees he thinks it's appaling that Jedi would hire bounty hunters to capture hostages. At which Gryph reminds him again that these masters did kill the students. And there were several call outs in the previous parts.

I think it's handled pretty well, especially compared to other Star Wars stories. The five masters certainly act very shifty, but except for Raana being extremely bad tempered they aren't maniacally cackling dark lords with red skin and black robes. They certainly don't behave at all like proper Jedi, but also not like full out Star Wars villains. They hate the Sith and try to protect the Republic, which very much sets them apart from pretty much any Dark Jedi that appear in other places who immediately go for galactic domination and minion killing.

When Zayne's dad showed up, I was thinking. "Oh, what a surprise, what are the odds?" Normally this would annoy me as shoddy writing, but I've long since embraced it as an integral part of what makes Star Wars. People running into each other at convenient moments in the exact same point in the whole big galaxy has long become a well established standard for Star Wars. May be completely unrealistic, but this is part of the game.

Yora

2016-02-14, 04:30 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348904197l/1925496.jpg

Zayne and Jarael decide to split up, as they are less likely to be recognized than if they are seen together. Before they leave, Camper gives Zayne a pair of bracers made from a material known only to him that can block lightsabers. It's also what the surface of Jarael's shock staff is made of. I am sure this will come very handy at some point in the future.

Zayne goes back to Gryph so they can leave the planet on the ship Gryph was supposed to hire. Instead Gryph hired a ship thief to steal one for them. The thief turns out to be a cowardly Trandoshan and the transport ship actually a field kitchen. The Trandoshan is smart enough to figure out that Gryph should pay him a lot more for the ship than originally agreed, and with some help from Zayne Gryph tricks him into a life debt so he can get the ship for free. The owners arrive at the landing pad and the three have to leave together immediately, running straight into Admiral Kararth fleet, which had been waiting only for them to join the convoy. With no alternative, they go with the fleet that is transporting troops to a planet expected to be attacked by the Mandalorians.
They set up their kitchen and it turns out the Trandoshan is a really good cook, and they are very popular with the soldiers. In the army camp Zayne meets Carth Onasi from the game, and they get along very well.

Jarael and Camper are attacked by a HK-24 assassin droid that somehow got on the ship, which gets Rohlan to come out from his hiding place to save them. Campers health goes even worth after the fight and Rohlan thinks they should go to Arkania to get treatment for him. Jarael isn't happy about it, since that's the place Camper had been fleeing from, but there isn't really anywhere else where you might find good doctors for an Arkanian.

Zayne has a vision that the planet they are on is going to be attacked by the Mandalorians the next day at sunset at the army camp they are staying, and that the Mandalorians will show how little they think about the Republic's idea to park their forces in the outskirts of major cities by annihilating the whole cities with their entire population and troops. Human shields are just lame and thinking that Mandalorians would be slowed down by it in any way is an insult to them.
Zayne sneaks on Carth's ship to get a ride to Admiral Karath's command ship. Carth finds him but believes him enough to take him to Karath and say what he has to say. Karath recognized Zayne, who was last seen heading to Mandalorian space when he went to rescue Jarael from Flashpoint. And of course the whole murdering the Jedi students thing that made the Jedi leave Taris, which then had all the big corporations pack their things and get them to safety before the Mandalorians come, leaving the planet already half abandoned. Not surprisingly, he's not convinced that he should reorganize his troops right when they are waiting for a Mandalorian attack because Zayne tells him he has to. Zayne tells him that Squint will confirm that he really went to Mandalorian space to rescue Jarael and Revan's Jedi and Carth goes to try to call him.

The Mandalorian fleet arrives to engage the Republic fleet and launch several nuclear missiles, which then go straight past Karath's ships and flatten all the major cities on the planets that had army camps near them. Carth was unable to reach Squint, but send tornado alarm warnings to most of the cities so that the entire populations would retreat to the underground bunkers. Gryph and the cook took off with their kitchen ship just at the last moment. Admiral Karath has other worries now than Zayne and has him taken to a prison cell.
The Mandalorian fleet attacks the Republic fleet for real and easily defeats them. Karath and Carth end up retreating to the cells as the command ship gets borded and with Zayne's help manage to escape with a shuttle. As they leave the lost battle they are getting a message from Adasca who invites Karath to a meeting where he wants to offer the Republic something that will win the war for them.

Arriving on Arkania, Jarael quickly gets identified as being of the genetically engineered worker race, which is forbidden from the major cities as their weak resistance against infections makes them a health hazard and seperated from the pureblood population in old mining camps. Fortunately she runs into a civil rights activist who tells her how to disguise herself as a pureblood with less pale skin, contact lenses, and gloves that look like pureblood hands with four big fingers instead of five thin ones. At a hospital she bribes a clerk to do a test on Camper's blood, even though he's not a pureblood, but very soon gets arrested by security as the lab workers figure out whose blood it is.
Jarael is taken to the headquarter ship of Adascorp and their boss Arkoh Adasca, who tells her that Camper was once one of their scientists and that they have the means to treat his illness, which is causing his dementia and paranoia. Since she's already found and Camper really needs help, there isn't really much choice other than leading Adasca to their ship. Camper is immediately taken to the hospital section of the giant ship while being completely passed out, but Rohlan gets into a fight with the security guards who want to take of his armor. But as personal guests of Lord Adasca they will make an exception. Adasca goes on to show Jarael more of the ship and tell her about Arkania and Camper, while Rohlan spends his time reading manuals about field medicine and experimenting with the material in the lab. Which really upsets the other scientists on the ship, but since he doesn't do any damage Lord Adasca insists that they let him do what he wants.
Adasca tells Jarael more about Arkanians, and that some generations ago they genetically modified workers to be better adapted for crystal mining, but it later turned out that these changes also lead to a much weaker immune system, which eventually forced them to keep the workers and their descendants isolated and cut off from the main infrastructure of the planet. But as heir and new leader of the biggest biotech and medical company he sees is at his moral duty to devote their resources to reversing the genetic changes and eventually allowing the descendants of the worker race to rejoin the pureblood society.

While Jarael is waiting for Camper to wake up, he is really already back to full health and being told that his dementia was from a contamination in the air system of his junk ship that had been hidden under a garbage pile for decades. And now that his mind works again, Adasca wants him to complete his work as they have not been able to make real progress since he ran away (and presumedly stole major parts of the research data).
Meanwhile Adasca tells Jarael about his current big project. Adascorp had discovered the giant space slugs which normally eat small planets and asteroids and travel between stars by hybernating for thousands of years as they drift through interstelar space. They pick the stars they travel to by seeing it's composition in their light spectrum, and there is one that seems to have a huge amount of the elements they need, as the system is full with hundreds of these extremely rare creatures. But once they had eaten everything up they went into hybernation and not yet left for other systems. Adascorp found the system, fed the space slugs with asteroids brought in by their mining branch, and installed mind control implants in their brain and currently adding hyperspace drives. Which Jarael thinks sounds pretty insane.
This one is pretty good again. Not really a lot happening with Zayne and Gryph, and that part of the story is mostly about Carth and Karath with Zayne being a bit of a spectator. But it's still a good read. The Jarael, Camper, Rohlan, and Adasca part is much stronger, even though most of it is exposition. But since it's not just stuff that we are being told, but stuff that is also completely new to Jarael and very important to her, it's a lot more entertaining than one would think.

There still are no big dramatic action scenes, but in strong contrast to the previous book we now have everything set up for a bang. The Mandalorians are on full on invasion now, Adasca reveals his space slugs, Camper is back at work though his exact past is still not revealed to us, and Admiral Karath has been invited to come visit Adasca for something really important.
This should get very exciting pretty soon.

russdm

2016-02-14, 04:52 PM

Rohlan has a sudden surprising interest in Medicine here, and it seems out of place for what we know of Rohlan so far. Or it could be hidden depths, that we simply haven't seen. It could be hidden depths or it's out of character. I personally lean towards one over the other. Mainly because Rohlan hasn't shown any real major interest in medicine before.

Also surprised about Carth, here, where he is so different from his video game persona. Carth is actually friendly and talkative and not prone to paranoia about betrayals. It is so neat to know that Carth was a normal human being before he ended up on the Endar Spire and with You, the main character of Knights of the Old Republic.

Yora

2016-02-14, 05:00 PM

When he does first aid after Camper is knocked out by the HK he mentions that there are two types of Mandalorians. Those who know how to use everything in a medkit and those who die. And once on Adasca's ship his main interest is field medicine, which I guess makes sense. And we have not really learned anything else about him, other than getting in trouble with the Mandalore for not following his new style of command.

Kantaki

2016-02-14, 05:51 PM

Ah, yes the sudden interest in medicine. At this point the whole battlefield-aid explanation makes sense, but after a certain point it turns into a glaring hint that something is off. Possibly the least of them, but a hint non the less. I remember how I cursed when they revealed Demagol.

I think my favorite Zayne/Gryph moment was whole life-debt scene and the introduction of Slyssk. :smallbiggrin:The poor guy has such a horribl past.:smallamused:

There we start with one of the more ridiculous evil plans* in the galaxy far far away. I agree with Darth Sunshine there. The whole plan is crazy. And it will only get worse.
*That I'm aware of. I'm pretty sure there have been worse.

russdm

2016-02-14, 06:13 PM

Ah, yes the sudden interest in medicine. At this point the whole battlefield-aid explanation makes sense, but after a certain point it turns into a glaring hint that something is off. Possibly the least of them, but a hint non the less. I remember how I cursed when they revealed Demagol.

I think my favorite Zayne/Gryph moment was whole life-debt scene and the introduction of Slyssk. :smallbiggrin:The poor guy has such a horribl past.:smallamused:

Agreed

I like the interactions between Gryph and Slyssk. They happen to really great, especially in how much they play off so well with each other. Also, Slyssk as a chef is funny since he is a Trandoshan, who are basically hunters of either Bounties or other living beings as their entire religion is about earning special points before they die which is most easily acquired through hunting.

Yora

2016-02-15, 05:18 AM

I think my favorite Zayne/Gryph moment was whole life-debt scene and the introduction of Slyssk. :smallbiggrin:The poor guy has such a horribl past.:smallamused:

"Kids can be so cruel..."
"That was my mother!"

Yora

2016-02-15, 05:25 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403203829l/3840160.jpg

Since this book contains the end of one story arc and the beginning of another, and they are both very distinctively seperate, I am going to deal with them both individually.
Though I want it to be said that this title is stupid.

Carth, Karath, and Zayne arrive at Adasca's ship and the swarm of space slugs. Adasca wants Jarael to welcome his guests with him but she wants nothing more to do with him and destroys some of the guard droids. Adasca reminds her that he has Camper as a hostage and that they can do all kinds of things to him that won't hinder his ability to complete the work he's doing for him. So she quietly agrees. And Surprise! One of the passengers on the Republic shuttle is Zayne. What are the odds? Adasca has no idea who Zayne is but is not happy about a friend of Jarael showing up right now. Admiral Karath still thinks Zayne is a Mandalorian spy and so he's taken to a cell on Adasca's ship.
Right after that Squint appears as the representative of Revan. Who also happens to know Jarael. What are the odds? Squint is surprised to see Rohlan, who was supposed to come with the Jedi to Corruscant when they took Demagol there, but who sneaked on Camper's ship instead. Rohlan asks what happened to Demagol and apparently he took some kind of poison that put him into a deep coma to prevent him being tortured for information and the doctors of the Republic have no idea how to wake him up again. Jarael reassures Squint that Rohlan can be trusted as he saved her and Camper from the HK-24 droid.
Jarael is about to tell Squint what's going on on Adasca's ship, but Adasca interrupts her in a completely unbelivable way and tells Squint to go on ahead to the reception that is about to begin soon. His Duros assistant informs him that another Jedi has just arrived uninvited. It turns out to be Lucien, who happens to be an old acquaintance of Adasca, as their families have a long business relationship. Apparently Lucien had some bad feelings about the slugs and wants to know what's it all about, though I don't know how he knows about them in the first place as he doesn't get force visions. Adasca gives him a poisoned drink that knocks him out, and has his assistant take him to a cell.
Adasca tells Karath and Squint that he intendes to sell the service of his space slugs to destroy star systems wherever they are directed to. As Star Wars superweapons go, this is actually one of the more plausible ones. Some Mandalorian ships arrive as the Mandalore himself has also been invited to take part in this auction. Adasca is not really interested in money at this point, but instead is looking for a partner to take control of the galaxy.

Mandalore and Squint immediately want to start a fight, but Adasca asks them to stop so they can all watch the demonstration of the space slugs. Now that the Mandalore has arrived, Rohlan wants to leave with Jarael, as Adasca had agreed, but he's telling him to wait a bit longer. Mandalore tells Rohlan that they create some kind of story that he was killed at Flashpoint while obeying Mandalore's orders, because his new army of Neo-Crusaders is all about obedience and control and they are getting a lot of new recruits who know nothing about Mandalorian culture and values. Rohlan thinks that this is not a very Mandalorian approach, to which Mandalore replies that ths is not a very Mandalorian war. Also, since they need the story that Rohlan became loyal to Mandalore and died, he gives Rohlan a new yellow Neo-Crusader armor to put on instead of his unique traditional battle suit.
Jarael gets a call from Camper on her communicator hidden in her armband. Camper is with the other scientists who are opperating the control ship for the space slugs but intends to do something to stop them, since he had a big part in developing the controls. Adasca discovers the communicator and tells Camper to go back to doing his work since he still has Jarael as hostage.
Meanwhile Zayne and Lucien are sharing a cell with their hands tied behind their backs and to each other. Simply because it's hilarious. Lucien tries to gloat and be smug, as it's his type, but Zayne is only mildly annoyed. Four pages dense with text, but nothing really new or important is being said. As two droids arrive to bring them food, they push them into the guard droids with the force and free themselves. Why they could not push guard droids against the other guard droids is not clear. A blaster bolt from a droid shots their handcufs that tie them together back to back right off without hitting either of them. What are the odds? A human guard comes in, who happens to carry Lucien's lightsaber (WATO) and he immediately tries to kill Zayne. But Zayne blocks the blow with his gauntlets that Camper gave him at the start of the previous book. Seeing that his surprise attack failed, Lucien gives up as it's futile to attempt a second strike against the much weaker and unarmed Zayne in a small room. So instead he gives him a blaster from one of the guards and they fight their way out together.
As the demonstration is about to begin, Carth Onasi excuses himself. Mandalore has little use for the slugs as they are raiders and have no interest in destroying planets, but he doesn't want them to fall into the hands of either the Republic or the Jedi. Karath says they are together on the same side, but Mandalore very much doubts that. Interesting that he says that, as the Republic Officer and the Jedi knight are Karath and Squint, who much later end up both betraying the Republic and the Jedi and being on the same side again.
The scientists on Adasca's ship inform his assistant that they discovered something when analyzing the blood of Jarael, but that same moment a shadowy figure appears in the door and kills them all to protect the knowledge that is only for him to know.

Zayne and Lucien run into Carth (WATO) and see what's going on at the negotiations on computer screens. Since Camper is working for Adasca only because he has Jarael as a hostage and Lucien thinks the obvious solution is that they need to kill Jarael. Rohlan appears behind him and tells him that he would kill him first, and Zayne is very happy to see that he's here too. Zayne and Rohlan come up with a better plan and Zayne puts on the red neo-crusader armor that Rohlan was supposed to put on. (It was yellow before, but they probably realized that a hero should wear red.) Rohlan, Zayne, and Carth return to the big negotiation room where some Republic officers and about a hundred Mandalorians are watching, and Zayne and Carth start a fight. Then Lucien comes charging in, Zayne pulls out his own lightsaber (Carth got it from his shuttle), as does Squint, and proclaims that they have come to take the Mandalore. Thinking that Adasca had set up this trap for them, the Mandalorians start fighting with the Adasca's guards. This very succesfully ends the whole negotiations.
While the other scientists on the control ship are busy, Camper calls his ship on autopilot and then transfers the control over all the space slugs to a small computer. The scientists are amazed that this is possible, but Camper says if they knew how all this technology works they wouldn't have waited twenty years until they get Camper back to help them. He then hacks the droid that is supposed to guard him and orders him to rip a hole into the hull. He also happens to wear a spacesuit and puts on his helmet. Since he destroyed all the other suits on board, the scientists have no choice but to get to the escape pod, leaving Camper alone on the ship. And sends the space slugs to attack Adasca's ship and eat the throne room. Fortunately the heroes all left the room four seconds earlier to get to Carth's shuttle while everyone was distracted. (It really was only three images earlier that Zayne said they should leave.)
Carth lets Zayne escape while the other Republic officers get to their shuttle. Camper sends a message to Jarael that he's taking the space slugs to a very far away system where nobody will be able to find them and then put them back to hybernation and remove their hyperdrives.
Then Lucien shows up again from somewhere and demands that Zayne becomes his prisoner, then Jarael and Rohlan can come with him on his ship. Zayne, being Zayne, agrees, but right then the ship of the Moomo's crashes into the hanger. What are the odds? Gryph had send them and the Trandoshan Slyssk to pick them up. They leave together, but Lucien has heard them saying they are going to fly to Taris.

Now we got plenty of over the top action that has been very much missing from the previous two books. While I fully embrace lucky coincidental encounters as a traditional element of Star Wars, this is overdoing it. Adasca happens to invite the Republic officer who right now is having Zayne as a prisoner on his ship. Revan's representative happens to be the one trustworthy Jedi both Zayne and Jarael know. And Lucien also appears where nobody had any reason to suspect Zayne might be found. And they happen to be tied together in the same cell on a huge ship. And run into Carth and Rohlan on the same huge ship. And the Moomos happen to arrive in the correct 30 second time window in the correct hangar bay. And all that in the space of probably one hour.
R2-D2 picking up Luke as he goes to Obi-Wan's house was an improbable coincidence. But most other seemingly fortunate happenstances in the movies really turned out to be the result of someone planning ahead. Or the timing is somewhat unlikely because that makes things more dramatic. But here it all seems to be really just nothing else but random chance.

As other reviewers have commented several times, the art here is not so great. It looks good compared to the Tales of the Jedi, but really much poorer than the rest of this series. And for some reason every character has a random white square somewhere on their nose in almost every picture. It just looks wrong and is totally not necessary.

And once again. Zayne and Jarael don't really do anything in this story. This is all about Adasca, Karath, and Mandalore doing their thing while the heroes are looking on. Gryph doesn't even appear. Not that this makes it a bad story, but Zayne and Jarael don't need to be in it. And this being my second reading of the series, I am getting rather disappointed by Jarael. She seems to be having only two states. Angry woman who beats everyone up at the slightest provocation, and helpless hostage standing around. Two bads don't make one good. Somehwere in the middle would be nice.
I remember her getting much more to do later in the series. I very much hope my memories aren't failing me on this one.

Taris has been invaded by the Mandalorians and the remaining forces have retreated to the lower levels. Gryph wants Zayne to come join him. Rohlan and Jarael take their ship down to the city and drop Zayne in his neo-crusader armor and a jetpack and then go back to space, where they stay for the rest of the story. Seems he knew exactly where to look as he lands about ten meters from the door to the basement where Gryph is hiding with a swoop gang he has allied with. The gang would like to join the planetary security troops, but being outlaws they need something to bargain for amnesty first. And with Zayne beeing wanted for a crime that is blamed to have caused the whole situation on Taris, the gang leader intends to give him to the police. Mission Vao, who looks three or four years younger than in the game, walks straight up to Zayne who she has never encountered before and tells him to follow her because her brother Griff is keeping some animal in a hidden basement that she wants to show them. Why does she want that? No explanation given at all. Zayne and Gryph come with her anyway, and it turns out that he's not caught some animal that he feeds, but the children of commander of the security forces, who had been kidnapped during the invasion. One of the gang leader's henchmen tries to attack Zayne to protect the secret, but one of the Moomos who stayed with Gryph appears and knocks him out.
The gang boss is not happy, but the children are actually a better gift for the commander than Zayne, so they are using them instead. Everyone goes to the hideout of the security forces and it turns out that Master Raana is there as well. And she brought the sister of her apprentice Shad and told Shel that she should kill Zayne. Fortuneately the blaser shot is stopped by the heavy suitcase in which Gryph carries his long range communicator with him.

The Moomo pulls out his gun because he wants Zayne to get the bounty (even though Raana is the one who hired him), Raana attacks him, which gets gang members to get out their guns and so the security troops are getting out theirs. Fortunately the Senator of Taris is there to step in and tell everyone to stand down. (Wouldn't a senator be on Coruscant? I think they mean governor.) That's also seems like a good moment to give back the children of the commander. The senator and the commander really need more people with weapons and so tell Raana to leave Zayne alone for now.
Gryph really is on Taris because some very important industrialists on Coruscant want him to find and rescue the senator. The senator had been involved in a lot of bribery and they really don't want that to come out if he is captured. Gryph and the senator call the guy who hired Gryph on the long range communicator and that guy is not too happy that the senator is now starting to be a honest leader of Taris. That moment the Moomo grabs the senator to claim the bounty that's offered for him. Raana shows up to rescue the senator and seeing that the Moomo isn't going to bring the senator to him, the employer activates the remote detonator that's on the big bulky communicator. But nothing happens. The Moomo (no way to tell them apart, really) takes a look at it and figures out that the bomb got damage when Zayne used the suitcase to block Shel's blaster shot at him.
In another part of the underground base, Zayne is trying to convice Shel that he didn't kill her brother. Raana appears in the door and says that she did it! In the same way as Darth Vader killed Anakin Skywalker. But it really was Zayne who killed him. Seriously? This was lame when Lucien told the Jedi Council that he murdered all the students. Because he's reponsible for their death, but it was really Zayne who killed them. It was lame the first time and it's now even more lame the second time.
On the Moomo ship, Jarael and Squint are having a conversation. There is a much bigger romance subplot on those two pages than Ulic and Nomi had throughout the entire TotJ series. But still Jarael is "No, but thanks."
The senator and the commander have come up with a plan. In the old Jedi Academy in the upper city, Cassus Fett has set up his command camp as the Mandalorians are plundering the planet. He's a special kind of Mandalorian who isn't a big fan of personal combat but super excited about managing big armies, which makes him one of the Mandalore's main generals and the supreme commander of the invasion of Taris. And they want to blow the whole building up with the bomb from the communicator. Setting the bomb in the basement is easy, but they need to make sure that Cassus Fett is actually in the building when they blow it up. Zayne knows the place so he volunteers to go in and check. Shel also volunteers because she's also been in there a few times to see her brother. She has absolutely no experience with fighting or covert opperations, but nobody seems to have a problem with that. But Raana insists that she has to go as well because she doesn't trust Zayne. While everyone goes to prepare, Raana gives Shel the crystal from her brother's lightsaber. When back in the academy, she can go to the storage room where the lightsabers are still kept, put the crystal back in, and then use it to kill Zayne.

Gryph, the Moomo, Raana, and some gang members get into the basement of the tower through the sewers and set the bomb. Zayne got his neo-crusader armor back on and put handcufs on Shel so they can simply walk into the tower through the front door, straight across a big square full of Mandalorians. Which is a good moment to talk again about how Zayne did or did not kill Shel's brother. People start staring and eventually an officer shouts what's going on over there. With the handcufs being hidden between them, Shel uses the timeless trick of pushing Zayne into a corner to kiss him. Which works perfectly and the Mandalorians are back to their own things.
Inside the tower Zayne leads Shel to the storage room while he goes to the roof. Shel finds the lightsaber and puts the crystal back in and then opens a locked gate to let Raana in from a ventilation shaft that leads down to the basement. At this point, why is Raana there at all? She wanted to watch over Zayne, which at no point during the mission she does. At the top of the tower Zayne only finds a single Mandalorian packing up the last remaining equipment. The guy patiently explains that they are already done with this part of the city and Cassus Fett has already moved on to other parts in the Undercity to attack the bases of the security forces in that area. Zayne doesn't seem to know anything, but the Mandalorian is not surprised as most of the new recruits don't. Then Raana shows up and kills him with her lightsaber. And then she starts a lighsaber fight with Zayne. Zayne does pretty well, but eventually loses and before she kills him she has to make a speech about why they killed the other students and why she has to kill Zayne now. As she is about to strike, Shel appears behind her and stabs her with her brother's lightsaber.
The gang members get a call that their base is under attack and want to get back to help, abandoning the mission. Gryph convinces the leader to take him to the top of the tower to pick up Zayne and Shel. Shel climbs up a rope and Zayne also grabs it, but Raana wakes up again and goes back on her feet, too weak to reach him. Zayne convinces her to let him safe her and reaches out his hand to grab her. Raana's sleeve got stuck on the shattered roof and tries to cut herself free, but in the speeder Gryph sees her pulling out her lightsaber and blows up the whole tower below them. Before the tower collapses, Raana shouts to Zayne that he should tell Krynda that she is sorry. Which is convenient, as without that name Zayne would not have any trail to follow.

This is one of the coolest parts of the series, and one of the few I still remembered very well. Finally we get one of these awesome big lightsaber fights that are the best thing about Star Wars. Two Jedi fighting on the roof of a half destroyed tower in the middle of a burning city that is full of explosives. How much better does it get?
On the other hand, the plot here is needlesly convoluted with the corrupt senator, the kidnapped children, Raana and Shel going with Zayne to the tower, and some other things I skipped over. And once you straighten it out to the actual core of the story, there is very little there. This is Raana and Zayne, with Shel being thrown in as an undecided party. Lots of other things are happening, but they don't actually contribute anything to that main plot.
The writing here isn't that great, but I think it's the pictures that are really selling the whole thing. Not only is the drawing pretty good compared to other artists that worked on the series, but it makes the things that are happening look really cool. The environments and the action look great. I am very much reminded of Bespin from The Empire Strikes Back in the way the places are shown and brought to life.

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/c/cc/Cassus_Tower.jpg

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/b/bb/Jedi_Tower_Skywalk.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20091106163012

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/3/3b/Taris_Jedi_Tower_Storage_Level.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20091106163600

Something I first noticed yesterday is that the guy who wrote this fatastic comic series also wrote the Lost Tribes of the Sith comic. Which is atrociously awful. How could that happen? He clearly is capable of doing good Star Wars comics!

Yora

2016-02-17, 03:52 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403200769l/4692999.jpg

Q'Anilia is having a vision of the four remaining Jedi masters being overwhelmed by a horde of rakghoul, monsters from an early level of the KotOR game that are simply ghouls with spikes. And they are somehow being controlled by an old man with a bear. She wonders if this is the present or the future, and Zayne appears in the vision saying "It's happening now". Darth Vader appears and says "And now." Someone who I think might be Luke appears and says "And now." And some human I've never seen before appears and says "And now."
The vision ends and the masters think that it is about the Muur Talisman. Xamar says he had felt its presence on Taris and was about to find and secure it, but... Lucien interrupts him to remind him that they have to think about the future now. Feln wants to go, but Lucien doesn't want the council to figure out their conspiracy so instead he's sending a message to a secret agent they have stationed on Taris, who does not appear in any of the records of the Jedi temple.
On Taris Zayne and Gryph are trying to survive in the Undercity after their friends had left to evacuate most of the survivors from the battle with Cassus Fett's soldiers. They run into Lucien's agent Celeste Morne who doesn't care about them and just wants them to leave her alone so she can do the job she's there to do. What are the odds? The floor of the tunnel collapses and they wake up in a dark corner of a large cave where the Mandalorian commander Pulsipher is just digging out a golden amulet while his solders are looking on. What are the odds? As the Mandalorians return to their ships, Celeste, Zayne, and Gryph follow.

On the Mandalorian ship, Pulsipher, who was the assistant of Demagol, plays around with the amulet and during his vilaious monologue Gryph hears him mention financial records taken from the Jedi Academy on Taris. Suddenly the amulet grabs his wrist and he grabs a soldier who just drops dead. Since Pulsipher is not feeling well, he's taken to his cabin.
The ship lands on an ice planet and as they try to sneak off once everyone is gone, Zayne and Gryph are immediately discovered by a guard who tells them to go over to the other new recruits. Zayne finds Celeste again sneaking around in the camp while Gryph got himself neo-crusader armor. Like that, they just walk up to the gates of the headquarter and Gryph tells the guards that he is taking two new hackers to the computer center to decrypt files taken from Taris and they get through without problems.
"You gotta love an elite killing force you can fool by putting on a hat." Thank you Gryph for telling us how dumb this is so that I don't need to do it myself.
Zayne tells Gryph to be careful with the blaster and Gryph replies that there is no danger because it's set to stun and the safety is on, and one second later the thing goes off and destroys the ceiling. Comedy gold. Guards arrive to see what's going on and one spots Celeste's lighsaber that conveniently fly into his direction. But before a fight starts one of the guards suddenly turns into a rakghoul. The other Mandalorians shot him but also turn into rakghoul. More guards arrive, are bitten by the rakghoul, and also turn into rakghoul. Zayne and Celeste run out a door and discover that the planet is not just a weapon factory but a huge army base with thousands of new warriors preparing for the next invasion.

Rakghoul swarm from the headquarter building and a big battle starts with the Mandalorians outside. Gryph finds the box with the files from the Jedi Temple to find Lucien's financial records to hopefully steal some of his money. While doing so he finds a recording in which Lucien explains that the Muur Talisman is a Sith artifact that lets you control a rapidly increasing swarm of rakghoul and also mentions that Celeste is one of his agents on Taris. What are the odds? Celeste calls Lucien on a com console while Zayne stands guard outside the door and Lucien tells her to kill Zayne immediately. Once she is done, Zayne says he also needs to make calls to warn the Republic about the Mandalorian arming assembling on the planet and the rakghoul. While his back is to Celeste, she turns on her lightsaber and is about to kill him, but then turns it off again. No reason given for that. Zayne calls Cassus Fett to warn him that there are rakghoul on the planet and that nobody should land on it to pick up troops. Cassus Fett considers it but is not entirely convinced that it's not a trick. Zayne decides to go back and look for Gryph, while Celeste... I don't know. Does something.
Rakghoul appear and capture Zayne and take him to the lab of Pulsipher, who seems somewhat upset that the Mandalore seems to ignore him while he's giving all his favors to Cassus Fett and still seems to hope that Demagol will return from the dead. He shows Zayne the amulet that is on his wrist and how it controls the rakghoul. Since it's a Sith artifact he doesn't really know what it does, but hopes that a Jedi might help him get more answers. If he refuses, Pulsipher will put him into a scanner shielded stasis box that some Sith lord created to imprison a rival for all time. As he gets close to Zayne, the amulet jumps off his arm and sits on Zayne, while the rakghoul jump to eat him. Celeste appears and takes the amulet away from Zayne and it grabs onto her instead. Gryph also happens to come running into the room that moment. What are the odds?

Celeste goes outside with Zayne to show off her new powers by commanding the rakghoul as they keep fighting the Mandalorians and having a monologue about awesome power. Gryph tells Zayne that Celeste works for Lucien and she reveals that she's really working for his mother Krynda to search the galaxy for Sith artifacts and destroy them. Zayne tells her that she's currently using a sith artifact to kill thousands of Mandalorians and turn them into monsters and she is somehow surprised and shoked by this stunning revelation. She thinks Zayne should kill her, since she can't take the amulet off, but Zayne has a better idea and tells her to get into the stasis box instead. It's build to not just block scanners but also the Force, since it's meant to imprision Sith lords. She gives him some kind of key so that he can take her in the box to a secret Jedi base where they are disposing of Sith artifacts and might have the means to get the amulet off.
Zayne and Gryph go back outside to see what the rakghoul are doing now, and of course they are a blind horde of monsters as they normally are. Instead of being torn to pieces, Jarael, Rohlan, and Squint show up, who apparently is now always called Alek, with the ship of the Moomos. What are the odds? They shot the rakghoul and Zayne and Gryph jump on board. With so many rakghoul they have to come back for Celeste and the box later. They take off just as the Manalorian fleet arrives and nukes the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
But the box is made of decentanium and survives, to sink into the freezing waters of the molten glacier. Presumedly to be discovered 4,000 years later by Darth Vader.

This short four part arc is part of some crossover series with other Star Wars comics. It's pretty bad. "Saga of Nomi Sunrider" bad. The only characters are Zayne, Gryph, Celeste, and Pulsipher. Two of them are new characters who have already left the series again by the end. Nothing really happens. The first and the fourth part really consist of only a single scene each in which people only talk without doing anything.
And it's unbelivably ugly. The coloring is pretty good, but the pencils are just awful. Everyone looks like half molten playdoo with facial features being arranged more or less randomly on a different misshapen blob in every picture and limbs and spines being bend without any pattern or logic. This is a big comic publisher that is paying money for professional artists. How did this happen? The only resemblance to art with wide appeal would be Picasso.

Fortunately this stor does not add anything to the story of Zayne Carrik and his friends. So you can simply skip it and probably never even know that there's a piece missing. Which I think you should do.
Krynda Draay is mentioned again, but the previous book ended with Zayne saying that he is going to look for Krynda Draay to figure out what's going on with this Jedi conspiracy. Any clues Zayne got from his encounter with Celeste are things he already knew.

Kantaki

2016-02-17, 05:01 PM

The fourth guy is another Skywalker, Cade (or something like that) from the Legacy comics, acts more like a smuggler, lives a hundredsomething years after the movies and can heal people with forcelightning. Oh and R2 is still around.
Not important.

Yes, the Vector crossover isn't that important. All it does is to explain how Zayne knows about his Masters’s toys and how he got the key to their attic.

And that's one master down, four to go. Fortunately the other guys are dealt with a bit faster.
I kinda like the irony of Raana’s demise. Always angry, acting on emotion, the one among the five who is the most likely to act rashly, on instinct dies on the edge of redemption because someone else reacts like she would have. I think this element is ultimately present for all masters (and other villains)

russdm

2016-02-17, 05:51 PM

With the handcufs being hidden between them, Shel uses the timeless trick of pushing Zayne into a corner to kiss him. Which works perfectly and the Mandalorians are back to their own things.

The Mandalorians watching actually comment on this, calling it "recruiting". It's really funny.

Vector explains how Zayne gets into the Covenant repository of Dark Side artifacts in the next comic arc. Celeste tells him about the place and what planet it is located on. As a way of helping him out. Then he goes there.

It is the only thing plot helpful that occurs in the story that is not related to the Murr talisman.

Yora

2016-02-17, 06:31 PM

One thing I liked in Vector (only remembering that now) are some comments made as joke, but also having some insight into what's going on. That's something the author does quite well. Adding small lines that expose people not actually following their own standards.

One moment is when a Mandalorian gives orders to the new recruits waiting for their armor.

"Get your armor, jetpack, and weapon and report ro your rally masters! You want to miss the war?"
"Uniforms? Ranks? What kind of rampaging horde is this?"

It's happening a bit often, but I guess it's assumed that most of them will go past the average reader unnoticed.

Yora

2016-02-19, 09:33 AM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403207435l/6130907.jpg

Sooo much going on in this one. I think I am going to have to skip much of the nonessential parts or I am going to be typing here all day.

Lucien Draay stands before the Jedi Council and humbly relents his defiance and submits to the will of the council. By accepting a seat as its newest member. Oh come on, this is the third or fourth fake out confession of the crimes of the Covenant masters. Really overdoing this joke. While he is going on with his acceptence monologue, Master Vandar and Master Vrook are wispering to each other that they don't trust him, but that this move is necessary to move the conspiracy out into the open so they can learn what Lucien and his compatriots are really up to. I am sure knowingly inviting your enemy who conspires against you to sit on your council can't possibly backfire.
Jarael lands on the home planet of Master Feln, disguised as Celeste Morne, to enter the containment facility for sith artifacts. In the big box the Moomos are carrying for her are Zayne and Gryph. The village of the Feeorin is in a terrible state, being half collapsed and decayed after many years of various natural disasters that are plaguing the area. The Feeorin warriors direct them to their sacred temple, which is forbidden to any members of their tribe except for their chief. It turns out that Feln is the chief of this tribe but almost never there, and has given the basements below the temple to the Jedi to store Sith artifacts. And as it turns out, there's a lot of them down there. Zayne and Gryph put on their GoPros to make recordings to show to the Jedi Council and then try to sneak out of the temple and back to the ship.
But some Feeorin warriors spot them and Jedi trying to sneak out of a place open to Jedi is very suspicous. So they are captured and brought to the current leader of the tribe who tells them how everything has gone to garbage once their chief Feln left with the Jedi and gave them access to the forbidden temple.
And as it turns out, Feln has just come back.

Feln calls Lucien about Zayne being on the planet and having going through the Sith artifacts they have stored there, and that Celeste is apparently dead. Lucien thinks the secret facility has been compromised and Feln should blow up the whole temple to destroy all evidence. The place was intended to dispose of the artifacts anyway. Haazen, the protege of Lucien's mother, drops into the conversation and orders Feln not to do it. Instead he should pack everything up and have it taken to the Draay palace on Coruscant.
Feln decides to kill Zayne, but the other Feeorin insist that he can not be attacked with weapons since he has been in the temple and that even the chief has to follow the ancient laws. So he has to kill Zayne with his bare hands, which also works for Feln. But Zayne is pretty experienced in running away and it takes quite some time to catch him. Zayne tells Feln that his friends are already on their way to pick him up and Feln thinks the risk that they steal some of the Sith artifacts is just to great. He presses the button to destroy the temple, but the explosion flatens almost the entire village of his tribe. Of course, the destruction of the village is all Zayne's fault! At that point the other Feeorin have enough of all this. Feln was untouchable after having been to the temple, but now that the temple is gone that no longer applies. And Gryph has stolen his lightsaber during the previous comotion and Feln is killed as the rest of the tribe turns on him.
On Coruscant, Xamar and Q'Anilia are having a vision of Feln's death and report it to Lucien. Q'Anilia is even more emotionally fragile than she alwasy has been and pretty much a total wreck by this point. Xamar is still "Told you so!", just as he has been from the very start. And Lucien is just pissed, as he's most of the time, and tells the other two do stop their whining and do what the tells them. Lucien is certain that Zayne has been collecting evidence about the Covenant collecting Sith artifacts and will try to show it to the Jedi Council and they have to make certain that he doesn't reach Coruscant. For that purpose Feln is going to go to Admiral Karath's command ship, who is in charge of guarding Coruscant from a Mandalorian attack. Xamar and Q'Anilia know that Xamar's foretold death is about being killed by the Republic Fleet at Coruscant and this seems to be the moment, but Xamar goes anyway.

In the lower parts of Coruscant, Master Vandar and Master Vrook are secretly meeting Alek and Shel. Shel has no real purpose, but it seems they wanted to have her appear again. For some reason. Alek tells them what happend with the rakghoul on the Mandalorian planet and that Zayne is coming to Coruscant to being more evidence of what the Covenant is secretly doing with Sith artifacts.
On the fleet in orbit around Coruscant, Admiral Karath is proudly showing his need command ship to Xamar. It has a new technology that allows to link the control of all the ships in the fleet together for maximum efficiency. Xamar wonders if it's wise to have all ships in the fleet controled by a single computer, and Karath agrees, but that's not his discision to make. Zayne and company arrive in the gunship of the Moomos and are intercepted by a group of fighters led by Carth Onasi (didn't know he's also a fighter pilot). Rohlan thinks trying to run this blockade is insanity and tried to convince both Zayne and Jarael to turn around and escape. With all the ships linked together, the gunship is getting badly hit and they are never going to make it to the surface. Zayne and Jarael have a briliant idea and decide that they are going to need another ship. So they are heading straight for Admiral Karath's command ship and let themselves be dragged into the hanger with tractor beams, but instead of trying to pull away they turn up the engines and crash right into it. It takes a while for the soldiers on the ship to get open the smashed doors to get into the hangar but only find Jarael and the Moomos. Zayne and Gryph have already left again in one the Republic shuttles that Slyssk has grabbed from the other side of the hangar. And like that they easily get past the rest of the blockade and down to Coruscant. But it turns out Xamar had already been waiting for them inside the shuttle. And he also really wants to talk to the Jedi Council.

A while later, Xamar delivers Zayne and Gryph to the Draay palace as his prisoners. And once inside it turns out to be a pretty big jedi academy run entirely by Krynda Draay. Zayne wonders how long the other Jedi of the Covenant will buy that he has become a Sith lord, but Xamar reminds him that they already believe that and it's unlikely they are starting to doubt that now that he claims it himself. They are brought before Lucien who wants to kill them right there and now, but again he is stopped by Haazen. Krynda is currently busy (and we actually haven't seen her yet except for flashbacks), but he wants to examine Zayne for her instead. Zayne goes all Sith Lord and tells them that they won't kill him now because he has all their precious Sith artifacts. Xamar says they are probably in the box on his ship and leaves to get them. Haazen very quickly figures out that the Muur Talisman on Zayne's neck is a fake and is really hiding his lightsaber inside. While he senses a plot, he is also very certain that Zayne is not a Sith.
At that moment Xamar opens the palace gates and the knights of the Jedi Council swarm in to arrest everyone. Alarms go off everywhere and Haazen gets out a communicator to call all the Jedi of the Covenant and commands them to execute Order 66. ...no Vindication. The Sith have revealed themselves and have turned out to be the Jedi Council. All of their people in the main Jedi temple are to raid the storerooms of Jedi and Sith artifacts and then everyone is to come immediately to defend the palace. Lucien and Q'Anilia freak out about an all out war between their Jedi and those of the Council right outside their window and don't really have and idea how to respond to what Haazen just did. And then Haazen uses one of his gadgets to have the Republic Fleet bombard the Jedi knights assaulting the palace gate, killing Xamar in the process. Just as the visions always said. He takes of his cloak and reveals himself to be fully decked out in shiny Sith artifacts. Who needs to be strong in the Force if you can have all this Sith bling?

[The next part is all one long flashback about how Haazen had always been a terrible Jedi and never became a knight. At one point he discovered a hidden Sith base and led Lucien's father and a group of other Jedi to the location, but the path had been mined and everyone was killed in the explosion. But Haazen's remains where recovered by the Sith and he was brought back to life with lots of Sith cybernetics. Nothing really important happening that advanced the plot.]

With the area around the palace being bombarded by the fleet to take out any Jedi who might have survived the first blast and Haazen going full Sith Lord, Lucien has enough of it and turns against his master. But with all his artifacts Haazen is pretty much invulnerable and able to throw Lucien around with no effort. Haazen doesn't like the Jedi but also hates the Sith for having almost killed him and then turned into a cyborg to be their slave. He now wants to make his own order and he wants both Lucien and Zayne as his apprentices. And Lucien is going to lead the Dark Side arm of that order. Lucien doesn't want to, but Haazen doesn't feel like giving him a choice.
Q'Anilia wakes up and digs herself out from under the rubble left from the fight between Lucien and Haazen. She's full out crazy now and runs off to protect Krynda. Zayne thinks this is a good idea. Maybe the leader of the Covenant will be able to stop Haazen, now that he's shown his true intentions. Gryph follows her but it turns out that Krynda had been in a stasis box the entire time, which is why nobody has actually seen her in person the entire time. Q'Anilia rants about Zayne having killed them all, but Gryph admits that both Raana and Feln really were his doing. That vision of the person in a red space suit really meant nothing, as lots of different people have been wearing that suit. Q'Anilia then kills herself with poison.
In the main hall Lucien is once again trying to kill Zayne for reasons not explained. While Haazen looks on from above a balcony and delivering pretentious monologues. Gryph arrives with Krynda, who he took from the stasis box, which makes Lucien stop to fight and rush over to him. Before she dies she tells him that he screwed up everything. He replies that he did exactly what she had always taught him, and she admits that she was wrong about that.

Lucien and Zayne fight some more and Zayne tries to convince him that Haazen is the Sith Lord they had been looking for all the time. The fight moves to the gardens where Haazen is going through the artifacts his agents had just brought from the Jedi Temple. Lucien hits a giant statue of his father with his lightsaber and get crushed under it. Haazen isn't too upset about it. One apprentice will also do. Zayne knells before him but then cuts of his hand with the gauntlet that had made Hazen invulnerable. Then he grabs Gryph and the two of thm are flying out of the palace. Actually Lucien threw them with the Force, because he wasn't actually dead and the statue was just a decoy to make Haazen believe he was. Lucien picks up the severed had that also has the remote control for the Republic Fleet on it and uses it to have the entire palace obliterated.
The next day Admiral Karath is holding some speech for the fallen and, as TheThan usually puts it, Gryph and Jarael are having some back and forth. Then Gryph and Zayne are having some banter.
And we're shown that Lucien survived having held the power glove when the palace was blasted, and is now living with some other Jedi on a gras planet.

In my usual understated way, I would say this was pretty good. I think the biggest flaw with this one is that there are so many things happening so quickly. In previous books there was often very little actually happening on a long number of pages and now everything is happening in one fast rush. Spreading everything out more evenly really would have helped a lot. The other thing that could have been better is the presence of characters who are not Zayne, Gryph, Lucien, or Haazen. Xamar gets a bit of a role, but everyone is still barely more than extras. I think Jarael and Rohlan have not really done anything meaningful since the space slugs. And why is Shel now one of Alek's henchwomen?
While I really like Xamar as a character, Q'Anilia is just very annoying. She seems to spend more time crying on her knees and fainting than anything else combined. I like the idea of the five masters all being screwed up, but Raana and Lucien did it a lot better. Feln was just rather flat and too much like Raana in always being agressive and violent. Raana had a bit of an explanation and background of being haunted by her constant visions and things getting much more worse for her throughout the story. It makes sense. With Feln we don't get anything. He's just an evil brute.
There probably are a good number of small logic holes when you start looking at the plot closely and characters doing some unexplainable things, but while reading it it's always very easy to follow and to get what is meant to be going on. The villain's big plan is especially mushy and unclear, but that is how the Dark Side rolls. Cause lots of death and destruction and then somehow rule the galaxy. It never is really any more deep or smarter than this. Not one of my favorite villains, but also not a bad one. It works very satisfactory.

I mostly like the art here, but it also includes the dumbest picture I've ever seen related to science fiction. How do you blockade an entire planet. Certainly not like this:
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/d/d2/Swiftsure_formation.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/494?cb=20091118055456
I have no words for this.

Kantaki

2016-02-19, 12:17 PM

The blockade is certainly weird, but I always figured that this was because of that fleet-link they used (I mean the ships are still mobile) and because they only needed to protect the areas with landing zones, not the whole planet. And who knows how hyperspace plays into this. Zayne’s ship - one of my favourites by the way, a shame the Moomos make it kinda ineffective with their quirks - more or less jumped right in front of them.

Haazen... This guy is the only reason Kylo Ren doesn't get the title of worst Sith ever. I mean, the first time I saw him I thought „Yup, that's our villain”. And when we get his flashback... well, he certainly is a dark mirror of Zayne. I mean, did he really think he was qualified to be a Jedi? That Barrison would bribe Master Arca to deny him his rank? That the latter would take such a bribe? Or that his origin mattered to the Jedi?:smallconfused: Then there is the way he betrays the Jedi. Even Anakin’s fall was less pathetic. And even during his endgame he would have been nothing without those Sith-toys others had gathered for him.
The sad thing is that his plot would be much more impressive otherwise.
Meh, he still looks great on the cover. In all his cybernetic glory, a red lightsaber raised over his head, a skull-helmet in his hand, in front of the blazing inferno of a burning Jedi-temple.

russdm

2016-02-19, 05:41 PM

I wonder if there was to be some hint that Haazen turned into Sion from Kotor 2, but it doesn't happen to be true, I guess. He makes mentions that make it sound like he could be Sion later, but who knows?

Kantaki

2016-02-19, 07:17 PM

I think Haazi might have a few metallic bits too many to be Darth Sion. I think „Darth Hayze” planning to give Lucien this way is the only thing that ties the cast to KotoR2.
Besides, I'm pretty sure after getting a taste of his own bombardment he is way worse off than Darth Sion ever was. Just look in what a state Lucien was - and he had that weird glove.

JCarter426

2016-02-19, 07:59 PM

Zayne and company arrive in the gunship of the Moomos and are intercepted by a group of fighters led by Carth Onasi (didn't know he's also a fighter pilot).
Yes, he was a fighter pilot; he says as much in the original game. But you seem to have missed another bit here. In his first appearance in the comics, he had recently been promoted to lieutenant and became a bridge officer. He's back flying a fighter in this instance because he got in trouble for letting Zayne escape the last time they met.

I wonder if there was to be some hint that Haazen turned into Sion from Kotor 2, but it doesn't happen to be true, I guess. He makes mentions that make it sound like he could be Sion later, but who knows?
The tease was that when the comic was being released, some people thought Lucien was going to become Darth Sion. His little epilogue is a sort of meta way of addressing that.

And since the first story arc is done with, now I'm free to ramble on about it without spoiling things. I thought it started strong and then really fell apart, starting around the Arkanian chapters. But especially those four issues of Vindication. The whole Convenant story was wrapped up way too quickly, and in a way that was inconsistent with all the foreshadowing. And I really question Haazen's plan. How is he supposed a shadowy manipulator when he tells both of his pawns exactly what his plan is and, in fact, that they are supposed to be his pawns? There are a lot of solid ideas - Haazen believing he's this shadowy manipulator but really being mistaken about his role in the prophecy, the fates of the other Covenant members, particularly Xamar, the misdirection of the red figure turning out to be Gryph rather than any of the padawans (it still should've been Revan or Malak, though... come on), Zayne posing as a Sith Lord to fool the Covenant - but everything was so rushed, and the plot twists could've been handled a lot better. And with more than four issues.

Yora

2016-02-20, 05:39 AM

The pacing could really have been a lot better. The story runs for six book collections and all but one of the villains are dealt with in the last one. The big bad really only becomes part of the story in the last one.
I am getting a strong impression that the series was planned to be 50 issues from the start, but around the halfway point it was decided to wrap the story up and start a new one. Had all this content be spread out over 22 issues instead of 7, it would have been a lot better.

I still very much like it and think it's very good for an American comic, but it could have still been better.

JCarter426

2016-02-20, 04:29 PM

Yeah, that was my impression as well... all this is speculation, but I know Dark Horse was not in a very good state at the time; all their Star Wars stuff was canceled to make room for four new series, including Knights of the Old Republic. Then the whole Vector crossover was supposed to draw new readership, particularly for those of the four that weren't selling well. I wouldn't be surprised if orders came from on high to wrap up the ongoing Covenant storyline immediately after Vector so they could start a new one story for the new readers.

And if that was the case, unfortunately, Vector didn't even work. Rebellion was canceled right after and Dark Times was given an irregular schedule until the remaining two series ended.

I wouldn't blame it all on failed marketing strategies, though. The series really dawdled after Reunion. We don't get anywhere with the Covenant plot until Taris again. Zayne even makes a joke about it at some point... in Vector, I think. That could be down to them assuming they had more time to tell the story, but three volumes is still a bit excessive.

Yora

2016-02-20, 04:55 PM

I think it might actually have done more good than harm. The plot gets very compressed, but before Vector it was really overly drawn out. I liked the Adasca story and the second visit to Taris, but it really should have been either shorter or more complex.
And even as compressed as the second half of the storyline was, I am not getting the impression that there were significant cuts in the material or open side strands discarded without resolution. It happens very fast, but it still seems like all the parts are still there.
Usually when a long running series gets a surprise wrapup the result is a lot uglier and not satisfying for anyone. So I am quite happy with how it turned out.

Yora

2016-02-21, 03:45 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403208548l/6403060.jpg

Gryph shows up on a space station where a Chevin crime boss is auctioning mining claims on newly discovered planets in the Outer Rim. Jarael and Rohlan arrive claiming that a planet that was auctioned for a huge amount of money a while back is already inhabited and the claim therefore worthless, but the planet is also much more rich in resources than previously estimated and they have come to sell proper mining rights on behalf of the natives. Or something like that. It's another one of Gryph's scams.

The local crime boss figures out they are trying to cheat him and has Jarael and Rohlan taken to some kind of shed with a glass roof that will roast them when the sun comes up. Zayne arrives at the station and saves Gryph. Rohlan tells Jarael that he thinks she has some minor powers in the Force and should try to use them to get their chains off since they have nothing to lose. Zayne thinks he's too late to save them because the sun has alrady risen, but Jarael and Rohlan escaped only mildly singed because she did manage to break the chain with the force. Everyone goes back to the ship and they leave while Gryph counts his pile of money.

They find a drifting ship that has been lost in a nebula in the Core Worlds, which turns out to be without power and gravity and all the rich passengers and the crew are dead. They get the power back on and find a little rat guy and his droid who seem to be the only survivors. Rohlan checks the corpses and finds signs that they did not die from lack of air or poison, but have all been strangled. At these words the droid in the background of the image looks startled with big dramatic highlight lines around his head.
It takes them very little time to figure out that the droid must have done it as he's the only one who could. The droid confesses that he's always cleaned up the corpses but never killed anyone of the people found dead around his master. At the same time the little rat guy tells Jarael that he's a Sith and had the mission to destabilize the high society of the Republic and now just keeps doing it for fun. He lifts Jarael with the Force and tries to strangle her. Zayne and Rohlan arrive and Zayne and the rat guy have a short lightsaber fight. The droid grabs his master from behind. He gets more angry and says that he's going to kill them all, especially Jarael, and Rohlan just shots him dead.

The crew next visits a space station where there's some kind of bike race wrestling going on. The last two fighters who remain standing advance to the next round, but that leaves the question why there's a bike race involved. There's no goal to reach and no points to score, why are they speeding around on their bikes? Zayne is a huge fan and just missed the last fight of his favorite champion by a few hours.
In addition to the professionals, there's a few spots open for skilled fans in the next big competition and Zayne want's to give it a try. Gryph wants to cheat at betting. Jarael is in a bad mood and bored by all of it.
Rohlan gets arrested by security for being a Mandalorian spy and Gryph tells them that he's here as a competitor and that the armor is his costume for the show. Now Rohlan doesn't have much of a choice to also join the competition.
The old champion has trouble with the organizers of the show. The professionals are really slaves and while the champions have kind of a good life the replacement fighters who are being trained live in terrible conditions. He would like to escape, but the organizers have his son who absolutely sucks at the fights and would easily die in an accident if they stop keeping him from harm. He tried to expose them so they covered it up by saying he's retiring, but now they want him to fight again and keep his son as hostage. Since he is starting in a different group, he tells Zayne to keep his son safe and in the competition.
Jarael has a vision of Alek, Rohlan, Demagol, and Adasca who all want to disect her to get her secret that is inside her. Then she sees Zayne who is held on a chain by a figure in the shadows, who based on the impossible Rob Leifield body position appears to be a woman. She wakes up, finds Zayne, and shows him a recording that Gryph found when hacking into the computers of the station for his fraud. It's a record of what the champion was saying to the audience after his last match, but which had been censored by the organisers. Zayne meets the champion and talks with him, and it's revealed that his son is always super distracted because he was never trained in how to block electronic signals that their species can sense in their environment. Zayne tries to give the boy some hints on how Jedi deal with their heightened awareness, but it doesn't help much. Rohlan is disappointed that Zayne tries to teach some random kid but doesn't train Jarael. But Zayne says that Jarael doesn't want to, she he doesn't.
Gryph, climing around in maintainance shafts, overhears a conversation between the organizer of the matches and the owner of the station, who turns out to be the same guy who had hired him to find the senator on Taris and then tried to blow them both up with a bomb. He's very concerned about Gryph having been seen on the station and their champion is trying to expose them, and he'd be ruined if his business partners find out that he's hiring slavers to find new fighters for their gladiator games. So they think it's best if the old champion is going to have a fatal accident.

Before the next big fight starts, Jarael puts on her most silly disguise yet to get at the musician who is in charge of the whole audio system for the stadium. LB is sneaked among the service droids who clean the waste bins. And Gryph is wearing an elaborate costume of the champion and mingling with the crowds, for no reason I am able to determine.
The competition starts and Rohlan finds out that the stun weapons have been set to full power but is saved by his fully functional battle armor. Zayne and the Champion are causing a comotion and the musician is told to play the halftime music. He puts on his datachip but it turns out to have been hacked to be play the recorded message of the champion in which he had tried to expose the enslavement of the professional competitors and it keeps playing even though he tries to turn it of. To distract everyone, Rohlan is declared winner of the tournament.
Later on some planet, the champion and his son get out of the big garbage can in which LB had carried them from the station on their ship. They see Jarael getting off her costume and both totally freak out and run away. Zayne asks Jarael what that was all about and if she got the marks on her skin from having been a slave, but she reveals that they are the signs of the slaver gang she once worked for.
Dun, dun, duuun...

On the space station the boss of the stadium is telling the slavers that he can't do any more business with them as there's now way too many rumors about their connection. The slaver doesn't care and kills him. She asks the organiser of the fights if Jarael was here and he confirms it, but he thought she was visiting on behalf of the gang.
The slaver is finally shown to be... Red Jarael. Pretty much just like Jarael, but with red skin instead of white.

Oh dear. All in all, this is pretty bad. First it starts with two issues of completely pointless filler. Then it continues with a single issue of almost completely pointless filler.
The other half of this book is a lot better though. The whole thing with the slave fighters was pretty good when you read it. But when you look at it again to figure out the exact details, the plot is a total mess. Very little make logical sense. First they want the champion removed, then they want to force him back into the fight, then they want to get rid of him again. They demand that he does certain things, and nothing of it makes even remotely any sense. What exactly do they want? And then there's a loud broadcast throughout the whole stadium about the fighters being slaved and most of them dying during training and they want to cover it up by declaring Rohlan the winner? Presumedly while that broadcast is still playing? How is that going to work?

On the plus side, finally all characters are getting used side by side and not only one or two of them at a time. That's a good step up from the previous arcs. And while the first story with the mining auction fraud was incredibly boring, the rest was actually pretty interesting to read. The pictures and the dialogue are good enough to make it not immediately noticable that the plot makes no sense. But you get the general idea of who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and why the bad guys are bad. It's only once I looked back at what actually happened that I noticed how stupid it all was.
It's really badly written, but I enjoyed reading it quite well.
I also liked what they did with Jarael here. She didn't really have anything to do since before Vector, but before that there was a lot of things hinting to her having a turbulent past. You don't just accidentally end up as a badass living on a junkyard with a brilliant engineer hiding from a powerful biotech company. She must have done something before. Throughout the whole story she is somewhat down and doesn't care about Zayne wanting to see the competitions and join in, or Gryph trying to make a fortune cheating at the betting, which I think is quite a well done buildup to the reveal at the end. There's no fun in any of it for her, but she also doesn't try to stop either Zayne or Gryph in any way. Instead she just stays in the background trying to ignore it and not being noticed while they are having their fun with it. So it doesn't seem like the reveal comes out from nowhere or conflicts with her character so far. The previous 60 pages already established how these two parts of her life come together.

Kantaki

2016-02-22, 08:48 AM

I think most of what happens serves as a set up for the next arc. Plus there are some fun moments. I mean crime-boss Slyssk is just funny and that they managed to downgrade their ship compared to the last two because our favorite Trandoshan is a even worse ship-buyer than thief is pretty amusing too.

And I'm pretty sure letting Aubin fight and offering Goethar that deal to win their freedom was just a way to get rid of him/punish him for his little speech. And make some profit while they do so. I mean the retired champ -loved by the masses- dying in a futile attempt to help his son? That should draw a audience, not to mention the additional merchandise they can sell.

Trying to distract the mob with the fact that they have a winner is silly, but it does look like as if the guy doing so has no idea what to do with this Fiasko to me.

Yora

2016-02-23, 05:18 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403208450l/7097993.jpg

On some jungle planet Zayne wants to hear more from Jarael about her past with the slavers. Jarael really prefers not to. When she was a kid they were being trained in fighting by a mean young woman so she challenged her to a fight for her position and won, just so they wouldn't have to suffer under her anymore. Then she met Camper who helped her get away and hide on Taris. Zayne thinks they should go after the slavers and try to find any of the other kids that had been captured with Jarael, but she thinks they are way too dangerous to attack.
A republic Cruiser arrives at the planet and Zayne meets a Cathar Jedi who tells him that the Jedi are now working with the Republic to fight the Mandalorians. Revan had been to the Cathar homeworld to investigate the disappearance of the planet's entire population and found a Mandalorian helm that caused all the Jedi to have a vision of how the Mandalorians killed all the Cathar and one of their own who protested against it. Even if the planet had only had a very small and dispersed population, I very much wonder how you can exterminate everyone without leaving any trace of a battle. But plot. Revan swars to wear the dead Mandalorian's helm until the Mandalorian crusaders have all been defeated!
Alek visits Jarael. He's now called Malak. And he has come to take Jarael to come with him to fight the Mandalorians. He's having a big monologue while Jarael is completely speechless, unless Rohlan shows up and interrupts him. Malak continues talking about how he will defeat the Mandalorians with Jarael and Rohlan punches him, which immediately turns into a full out blaster and lightsaber fight. His Jedi friends are not happy with his agressive violence and stop the fight. Zayne also arrives and Malak tells him that he has come to take Jarael. Zayne says allright, goes to Jarael and gives her a kiss, and tells her to be back soon. This apparently clearly throws Malaks plans into the wind and shortly after he leaves without Jarael.
Zayne thinks Jarael should go with Malak if she wants to, or wait for a while longer until she decides what she wants to do. But he really likes the idea of going after the slavers together.

Zayne and Jarael arrive in their ugly mining ship at an asteroid mining opperation running on slave labor in full space ganster gear, just walking straight onto the captain's bridge and telling her that prices for new slaves have increased and they've come to collect the advance payment for the next delivery. Since the miners probably won't have the cash right now they just brought their own mining ship to carry off the crystals from the asteroid they are currently cracking. Gryph loves this plan. A wonderful con.
Zayne is talking to the foreman of the slaves and realizes that this opperation isn't just having about a dozen slaves as he expected but more around 80. A lot more than they can get on their ship. At the same time the captain called the boss of the slavers who confirmed her suspicion that they didn't send anyone to collect a shipment of crystals. Guards arrive but Zayne and Jarael manage to get into spacesuits and jump out the airlock towards the asteroid on which the slaves are working. Zayne calles Gryph to get the ship to the other side of the asteroid and he's immediately having a stroke. This is not the con they planned!
Unfortunately, a slaver ship was already in the area and jumps from hyperspace right next to them.

Some of the slave workers make it into the hold of Gryph's mining ship but a large number is captured by the slaver's droids. Zayne jumps after Jarael who had been grabbed and destroyes the droid, but neither of them have jetpacks to get back to their ship. But Rohlan has and he arrives to grab them both.
The slaver ship tries to pull them in, but a mining ship is equiped with a lot of gear to make big holes into rock and metal. But despite all the damage they cause to the much larger ship, they can't get away. Gryph has already started the ore centrifuge expecting to process the load of crystals. Zayne grabs a big steel beam to jam the centrifuge, which throws the whole ship into a rapid spin.
Next page they are unloading the freed slaves at a refugee camp. How did this happen? How did spinning the ship let them escape a big warship? Who cares? Plot. Gryph is understandably angry, having been told that they were going to steal a huge load of valuable crystals. And now they want him to come along to attack slavers Jarael used to work for? Does everyone now have a secret past? Is Rohlan secretly a Bith bandleader who will need their help to get to a concert? Jarael just wanted to get away from them, but now she agrees that Zayne was right. With the skills and abilities they have now, they really should do something about the slavers. Rohlan fully supports her in this and so Gryph really doesn't have any choice. (Slysk is not having any vote on this.)
The captain of the slaver ship is brought back to his bosses in chains and Chantique, the red Jarael, really wants to kill him for that. But her boss interrupts her. This is not just a matter that concerns the slave hunting department but a bigger threat to their whole organization. Any involvement by Jedi is a major problem. And he would like to have the captain alive, since he is the only one of them who has dealt with Zayne so far.
On Coruscant, Demagol is finally about to wake up. Dun, dun, duuun...

Many years ago, we see the teacher of Jarael's and Chantique's school talk to the slaver captain to take Chantique, because she's too agressive and of no use to him. Now she is the captain's boss.
Zayne's briliant plan to infiltrate the slavers was to disguise himself as an imperial officer and let himself get captured while them, pretending he got lost in his starfighter. (He should be wearing a pilot uniform them, not a fancy officer uniform.) He gets in and they have him fight other slaves for training. He knocks out the first opponent almost by accident and so gets thrown into the next pen with another opponent. He uses the Force to push his enemy back and Chantique has him pulled out to talk to him. Mostly for a bit more exposition, but nothing terribly new or revealing.
While everyone is eating, Zayne is talking to the second slave he was fighting. The slave has telepathic abilities and has the collected memories from all members of his species that were trained in the slavers base, even from those who were there long before he arrived. He shows Zayne his memories and reveals that this base has been there for hundreds of years since the time of the Sith Empire and was used to train slave armies for the Sith. Since they are promoting promising slaves to become trainers for the new arrivals, the opperation has been kept going even when the Sith Empire was destroyed as the Jedi and the Republic never found it. Zayne falls over from all the memories and the boss of the slavers arrives with Chantique, who thinks that Zayne is now ready for what she wants with him.
She takes him to her fancy quarters to have another talk with him. They knew he was not a republic pilot right from the start because the captain who caught him immediately noticed that his starfighter was second hand and not Republic Navy equipment. And of course they also removed the tracking device so nobody is going to come following him to this base. Then she keeps going on how Jarael was always super evil and badass and totally not his type.

On the ship, Jarael is pissed that they have no idea where Zayne has been taken to. Gryph thinks the plan was stupid to begin with. (Which it was.) Jarael considers calling Malak for herlp, but Rohlan is completely against that. So Jarael goes to see LB and ask him if he knows anything about any friends Zayne might have who could help him. LB tells her he had been in contact with Shel.
At the slaver base, Chantique is telling Zayne more stories about how bad Jarael is. It takes him a really long time to figure out that Chantique also has slight Force powers and tries to do a mind trick on him.
So he is send back to more fights against other slaves and is fighting again against the slave who showed him the memories of the place. Zayne refuses and throws away his knife but the slave still attacks him. Zayne grabs his hand to keep the knife away from his own chest so the slave turns the blade around and stabs himself to death.
Chantique decides that it's now a good moment to get all the remaining slaves on the ship and abandon the base, leaving only Zayne behind alone. The captain of the ship and the other regional boss are unhappy, but Chantique wants it as a message to Jarael.
A while later Jarael and the others arrive. She contacted Shel, who had been working with the Taris senator and had investigated disappearances linked to slavers in the region for a while. And they had gotten a hint that the slaver's base might be on this planet. I assume the implication here is that Chantique send that information to make sure someone picks up Zayne. Otherwise it would be very unlikely that the base is accidentally discovered after more than a thousand years of opperation right now. But Zayne is not happy at all.

All in all, I liked this. But again, going through everything a second time to make a summary, the plot is almost more holes than plot. It really only works because it's a comic and you breeze through it so quickly that you don't have the time to notice it. The first part is really quite weak. Nothing actually happens other than Malak showing up and doing a lot of monologueing while Jarael silently sits by in the background. I get what the idea was, but Jarael really keeps to jump too much between extreme states of emotions. First super agressive, then very silly, then super agressive again, then helpless damsel dragged around at her wrist. Then a short perioid of relatively well done feeling down, and then again way too strongly sitting around passively. Too much drama! I like the idea, but the execution is too swingy and inconsistent.
And then Zayne goes full out emo because Chantique tells him Jarael is evil. Even when he figures out that she's using the Force to manipulate his mind, he still seems to buy it. And the whole episodes drags out way too long.
But generally the pacing is still pretty good. There's a good mix of action and exposition and most importantly things progress steadily. There isn't much filler.

I also want to complain about my favorite objection to Star Wars, which is the incredibly racist mindset that most Star Wars writers adopt when writing Star Wars. What's the first thing that comes to Gryph's mind when he thinks of a hilarious secret identity for Rohlan? A Bith musician.
Because every single Bith in Star Wars is a musician. As every single Jawa is a salvage trader. And every Hutt a crime boss. And every wookie an ex-slave. And all Corellians hotshot ace pilots. And all female Twi'Leks dancers. In Star Wars, it's generally sufficient to see an alien species once for the first three seconds in which it appears. You then know everything there is to know about 99% of all characters of that species you will ever encounter. Is that really necessary?

Kantaki

2016-02-23, 07:09 PM

Well sure Star Wars tends to be kinda bad when it comes to species and their hats. Not worse than Star Trek, but not better either.
But to me this makes the rare exemption - like Chantique and her father just more enjoyable.
The cut from the asteroid field to the space port-thingy was a bit sudden, but they did blow up the drones and I guess the Gladiator wasn't in a state to pursuit them after being hit with drill-harpoons, acid, hooks and laserfire. Not to mention that they were hooked to a spinning mining-ship.

My problem with the slavers is that they are all slaves to their own organization, they are just the ones who were ruthless/ strong enough to climb the ranks. How did this organization keep going after loosing their masters, their purpose? Sure, the Sith-war wasn't that long ago, but it still seems weird.
Well, maybe not, considering how humans (and other species in this context) can be.

Yora

2016-02-24, 05:11 AM

The Sith Empire was destroyed over 1000 years ago. That's a very long time.

But I like the idea. The Sith created a system of evil exploitation that keeps on going even without guidance or purpose. That apparently all their membership is recruited from their victims is the less plausible part of the scenario. But they really need only one slave in a thousand to have the right personalty for that. The vast majority gets sold or dies. And if anyone is able to set up such a system that can run entirely on collaborators, the Sith would be exactly the ones you suspect.
At one point Chantique even says that she was thrown out after everyone thought she wouldn't be able to fight again after Jarael injured her, but once she recovered she broke out and came back to reclaim her position. Because that was a job ahe knew how to do and at which she had considerable power.
The slavers probably hate the older members who originally caught and trained them, but that's completely within the Sith way. Taking your power from your superiors when they slip is their thing. Hating each other is Sith tradition.

Sure, it's all rather improbable. But I really like the idea as a new facet of Sith evil.

Kantaki

2016-02-24, 09:22 AM

So they lost their Sith-masters that long ago.
That makes it weirder. On the other hand we are talking about a galaxy where the same ship class is used for ~3000 years. Compared to that this cult still existing after thousand years without its masters, without purpose. sounds almost reasonable.
Science Fiction/Fantasy - and especially Star Wars - is bad with numbers sometimes.

But I agree, the idea is interesting. Especially because it shows just how dangerous the Sith are. I mean, sure there have been people who were corrupted by Sith-artifacts or by the whispering of some Sith-Lord -living or dead - and some even entered this path with the best intentions, but this organization? The only way to survive, to improve your lot is to become just like them. No dark powers or manipulations involved.
I'm pretty sure if Jarael hadn't found a way to escape she would either have turned out like Chantique or - in the best case - she would have died.

Yora

2016-03-02, 04:44 PM

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335144963l/9195356.jpg

On Coruscant, Demagol is taken to a big public trial. He's still not fully back to his senses, but everything indicates that this is really just to parade their famous captive and not to find any kind of truth or get justice. Malak has also come to testify as one of Demagol's prisoners on Flashpoint and is once more asking about Jarael. But Zayne, Gryph, and Slyssk came alone and she's off somewhere else with Rohlan. And actually it was Rohlan who insisted that they go to the trial when they heard about Demagol having woken up. Something seems a bit fishy to Zayne.
Gryph also isn't happy at all, as he has just found out that Zayne had secretly been taking money from the profits they made from stealing from the slave miners. Zayne appologizes and promisses that he's still going to give it back later as he planned from the start. Also, Gryph and Slyssk have started a restaurant chain exploiting their status as war heroes. When the Mandalorians nuked Serocco they weren't able to get their own ship off the planet quickly enough and so Slyssk did what he does and ran for the next nearby spaceship and took off with it. Which happened to be a Republic troop transport that couldn't take off because the pilots where nowhere to be found before the missiles hit the planet. So Slyssk ended up saving the lives of hundreds of soldiers and Gryph managed to make it look like it was all his doing.
They agree that they are having way too many secrets from each other and the only one who doesn't is LB, who always just wants to sit and think in quiet. And Zayne mentions that now that Rohlan is gone, LB doesn't even have to worry about the guy who broke his hand anymore.

"That was not the Mandalorian who broke my hand."

Dun, dun, duuuuuun!!!

LB is a loading droid and he always knows exactly the weight of everything he picked up and carried around and when he picked up Rohlan and threw him around after he broke his hand with the loading ramp of Camper's ship he weighted a lot more than the one who had with them all the past months. And since they were at Flashpoint where Demagol had experimented on cptured Jedi, Rohlan had all that interest in medicine and chemistry. And once called Zayne a human. Oh, Shi-
Inside the old Senate Hall where the trial is taking place, the crowd gets restless and it's decided to get Demagol out of the building. To police officers take him to a speeder and take him away. He takes of his helm and it's Rohlan Dyre. And the guards take of their helms and they are Zyne and Gryph.
Jarael and Demagol got themselves a new ship and have decided to start looking for the other children that had been kidnapped with her, as Chantique mentioned something about them being held at in ironic place, which means it's almost certainly their old school. But Jarael has no idea where that planet is. But Demagol does. Jarael is surprised because there's no way that Rohlan would know that. He takes of his helmet and "Jarael, I am your old teacher!"

Dun, dun, duuuuuun!!!

Also: What a coincidence!

Jarael is super happy about it! That's somewhat unexpected. He explains that he had been to another planet when the slavers raided the school and everyone was gone when he returned. Unable to find them he eventually joined the Mandalorians. She is surprised that he never said anything before all the time since they have met again and he says he just didn't have anything to excuse how he was never able to save them and so kept his identity a secret until it was no longer possible. Now that they have a chance to resque the others he has to come out in the open with it.
On Coruscant, Rohlan tells Zayne and Gryph what he knows about Demagol. He never liked the new Mandalore and hated his two right hand man even more. Cassus Fett doesn't fight fair and Demagol is even worse. So he spend a lot of time trying to learn more about them and their pasts and what they might really be planning. Demagol had been kidnapped as a child by a weird species of cyborg scientists who made him one of their apprentices. The cyborgs where destroyed by the Mandalorians before the Sith War and took many of their slaves in and trained them as warriors. Demagol was trained by the old Mandalore himself and when he was defeated in his duel with Ulic Qel-Droma he started to get interested in the Force. He found and stole the robe of the Jedi master Arca Jeth and got from it some DNA samples on which he started to experiment. He first went to Arkania where there was a big university for genetic engineering run by people with very little moral hesitations. But eventually all non-Arkanians were kicked out and Demagol teamed up with some of the Offshot scientists who had also been banned from public institutions. But without proper equipment and funding they couldn't really continue their work and so Demagol got it from the other Mandalorians for the promise of creating genetically engineered super-crusaders to recover their losses after the war. And it turned out that the procedure they were trying to perform really only worked with Arkanian Offshots, who had already been genetically engineered by the Arkanians to be easy to further customize. So they altered the child of two of the Arkanian Offshots of the team, which was Jarael. Since they needed more adult offshots to produce more children, Demagol contacted slavers to get them some. Unfortunately, ruthless violent criminals are not exactly trustworthy business partners and one day they decided to simply raid his research facility and take all these children that were bred and trained to become supersoldiers. The other remaining researchers where obviously angry and left and Demagol returned alone to the Mandalorian to start his reserach on captured Jedi knights.
Then when Zayne and Rohlan had freed the Jedi on Flashpoint and Rohlan went back inside to get Demagol, he had already woken up, surprised Rohlan, drugged him up, and switched their suits.
Shel arrives and she and Zayne take everyone else to their new secret superhero lair, which they think is needed now that the Republic and the Jedi are all occupied with the Mandalorians and there's a lack of low-level villain fighting. Zayne remembers that Chantique told him she's keeping the others that were kidnapped by the slavers from the school in an ironic place, which he also assumed to mean is their old school. He doesn't know where it is, but he know's someone who does.
At this point Slyssk comes up to Gryph to show him something he just remembered. It's a little tag he found while cleaning up, which says "Double-bladed lightsaber of Exar Kun". It must have been one of the Sith artifacts that Lucien Draay had been keeping in their secret storage base and that the Moomos had tried to steal. It would have been inside the block of yellow plastic in which all the artifacts where sealed, so Demagol must have found a way to dissolve it and get at the lightsaber. Being a potentially powerful Sith artifact, this can't mean a good thing.

Out in space, the Republic Fleet of Admirial Karath has intercepted a Mandalorian transmission and set up an ambush in an asteroid field. Someone who also has gotten wind of it is the slaver captain who has hidden his ship in position to pick up the escape pods from any destroyed ships, as the soldiers will make great slaves. The Mandalorians appear but jump to Hyperspeed again immediately. Zayne calls Karath and tells him that the famous slaver captain is hiding right next to them and they probably should try to arrest him. He and Rohlan had called Cassus Fett and made a deal with him, that they get rid of Demagol for him if he has his fleet stage this short distraction for him. Since he hates Demagol and considers him a threat to his position as highest ranking Mandalorian, he had taken that offer.
The slaver ship is captured by the Republic Fleet and since it was the captain who led the raid on the school, they can take the coordinates from his ship's computer. Admirial Karath gets a wanted high profile criminal who happens to be a traiterous former Republic officer, and so everyone is happy.
Demagol and Jarael arrive at the school, with Jarael using Exar Kuns double lightsaber, and they make short work of the slavers they encounter.
Zayne and Gryph have a chat about how Zayne always gets into all these incredible accidents and coincidences. Zayne thinks it means he's unable to use the Force effectively but Gryph tells him he should look at it more like a card player. The key to winning is not to always have good cards, but to know when not to take unnecessary risks and to exploit opportunities when they show up. And in the long run, Zayne always seem to win in the end.
At the school Jarael finds Chantique. Who uses the opportunity to do some villainous taunting. But Jarael turns out to be a much better fighter and pretty easily defeats her and is about to kill her with the lightsaber.

Since space ships always travel at the speed of plot in Star Wars, Zayne and Rohlan arrive at the school at just that time. Rohlan carries Zayne with his jetpack and drops him on the roof of the old school building, but Zayne lands on a glass ceiling and crashes right on top of Jarael. Fortunately without getting killed by the lightsaber she holds over her head. Chantique gets back up and grabs the double lightsaber and Zayne starts fighting her. Chantique is really surprised that he came back to Jarael even though she told him about her past. But Zayne knows all that and he also knows that she's always been the good one who helped the other prisoners as much as she could. And he also knows about Chantiques father and tells her to try to see his thoughts with the Force. He sold her to the slavers because the genetic engineering on her didn't work and she was useless to his work. And he also happens to have come to this place this day.
Meanwhile Rohlan tracks down Demagol in another part of the school. They have a fight but Demagol is able to knock him out with a Force push, to his own surprise.
Zayne helps Jarael up and tells her that her old teacher created the school as a Mandalorian facility to create Force users. Fortunately he arrived just before Jarael killed Chantique with Exar Kun's lightsaber as it might have the power to bring a Force user to the dark side. But Jarael wasn't feeling anything like that from it. But Chantique does! (Who somehow just stood by patiently during the whole conversation.) With the extra strength from the artifact she easily pulls Zayne's lightsaber from his hand. Demagol appears behind her and stabs her in the back with a knife. She falls down and he demands that she tells her where his children are. Not her, of course, the useful ones. She points him to the schoolyard, but it's empty. It's where she burried all of them after she had killed them.
But all is not lost. He still has Jarael, who always has been the most powerful of the children. But of course she doesn't want anything to do with his work and go with Zayne instead. Demagol says Zayne never was able to teach her anything to improve her strength in the Force. But Zayne now knows why, which is because Jarael doesn't have any Force powers at all. When she and Demagol escaped from being executed by criminals by breaking their chain with the Force, it was Demagol who did it all by himself while watching Jarael trying to do it. The whole experiments on the Arkanian children never worked and the only one that actually had any Force powers was Chantique. All the positive results during the experiments where really just Demagol himself doing the things he wanted the children to do.
Chantique pulls the knife from her back and jumps at Demagol. He uses the Force to pull the lightsaber to him and grabs one to stab Chantique as she flies toward him. But he ends up grabbing the double bladed one of Exar Kun and both of them get impaled through the chest. Well, it was a fifty-fifty chance. But as Zayne points out "Not around me."
Some time later back on Coruscant, Rohlan has a surprise. While he was digging around in Demagol's past, he found some of the other researchers from his team, among them Jarael's parents who are still alive. How nice. Gryph and Zayne have some final banter. Then Jarael and Zayne have some banter and in the end she gets her boy.

The End (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpaQ6xaQ4k4)

From here on we're openly talking about "I am your father!" style spoilers. If you're still reading this without having decided to read the series yourself there is no helping you.

Yay! Well mostly. Back when I read chapter #10 for the first time, I was thinking "This thing with Demagol being knocked out and Rohlan sneaking on Camper's ship seems a bit fishy." But the character had been introduced only at the very end of chapter #7 and 10-20 chapters later you forget about it. But it all immediately fell into place at "That was not the Mandalorian who crushed my hand." Worked perfectly for me. And reading everything again a second time there are hints about it freaking everywhere. But this whole series relies a lot on not looking too closely at small details, so it's probably not very difficult to miss.
Generally, I really like this conclusion. Jarael not having any Force powers at all was also a fun idea. And a briliant scientists spending decades on analyzing useless data because he didn't do the experiements double blind is also a really nice one. And of course, there's the little implication that Force powers really aren't tied to genetics, even though some kind of family connection obviously exists. Injecting midiclorians doesn't work. When you read the series carefully, it becomes obvious at which point the writing was changed to a much quicker pace, the Lucien Draay story brought to a quick end, and some first hints laid out for the next big arc. But I am really curious how much of this eventual ending of the series had been planned right from the start. Did they decide what to do with the Mandalorian swap back when they did it or was this now a way to pick up an abandoned threat again? Was Jarael's Force power meant to be fake from the start, or did they later decide to backpaddle and make it so that Not-Rohlan actually did it? To me it very much feels like these things had all been decided from the very start and that they just did some experimenting with the format in which these things would be presented. But if they really picked up lose threads from abandoned planned storylines, then they did a really magnificent job at it.

The one big problem I have with this story is the classic Female Hero Problem. This story is about Jarael. But Jarael doesn't actually do anything. This is a Disney Princess Heroine. She's just there to be pretty and have various other men fight about her. She has absolutely no agency at all here. She always does what Demagol and Zayne are telling her. She doesn't make any descision. That character had so much more potential. I like Zayne and Gryph, but here they really should have been supprting actors to her show.

But yeah, still my second favorite American comic after Hellboy and before Sandman. And also one of my favorite Star Wars works, and that's from a pretty hardcore Star Wars fan who considers almost nothing after 1998 to be worthy of his notice. :smalltongue: