Disney owning both Marvel and Lucasfilm means there can be some quick and easy corporate synergy. As it is, that means that the Star Wars comics have actually been good.
I loved that Darth Vader series. How did the other original title, Star Wars, the one that followed the good guys, do with its first trade, subtitled Skywalker Strikes?
As with the previously mentioned Darth Vader series, this series picks up sometime after the end of the original movie and bridges the gap between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. That’s not a bad idea, especially as it doesn’t seem to make sense for Luke to have learned that much from Obi-Wan Kenobi during a short space flight. Where did he learn anything about the Force by the time Empire started?
This book doesn’t answer that, but it does show that Luke doesn’t know a whole heck of a lot. As he, Han, Leia, and their crew infiltrate an Imperial weapons factory under the auspices of “buying” weapons from it, the Imperial negotiator turns out to be Darth Vader himself, and the big guy makes Luke and the others look bad. The group only barely escapes, proving to Luke that he needs to learn more about the Force but unsure how to even do that. Factor in as well that Han has a secret of his own he’s been keeping from, oh, everybody, and the series is off to a good start.
Marvel did well on these series, though it helped that they hired a lot of top talent to work on these. Here, writer Jason Aaron and artist John Cassaday do some high quality work, surprising considering how much they might be constrained by a pre-existing universe between movies.  Nine out of ten abused Rodians.
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