Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith
At this point we jump forward over 20,000 years, a gap more than four times the span of the remaining stories on our timeline. Despite the breadth of established lore that populates these millennia, none of their events have ever appeared in an actual story. Something I don’t think many people realize is the extent of the EU that exists outside the crappy books by hack writers. Like Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, most Star Wars lore has never been depicted on page or screen. Instead, it exists as a surprisingly intricate and complex fictional history gradually pieced together over decades of roleplaying game guidebooks, reference articles in Star Wars periodicals and online, and the Essential Guide series, among others. With the Disney reboot, all of that history and the work that went into weaving it is now gone. Tough break, dorks!
We open with an introduction to one of our four main characters: Odan-Urr, an alien Jedi Knight who looks like a flaccid penis with teeth. Odan-Urr is this nerdy bookworm obsessed with researching ancient Jedi history. Of special interest to him is the history of the Sith, which right off the bat creates a continuity error because at this point in time the Sith are still secluded in their own area of the galaxy that the Republic hasn’t discovered yet, so how the hell do the Jedi know about them?
[Continuity Note: This was eventually retconned in “Evil Never Dies: The Sith Dynasties” (2006), an online reference article that claimed that some of the defeated Dark Jedi exiles returned to the Republic seeking revenge and spilled their guts about the Sith before getting their asses kicked a second time. Similarly contrived explanations for other discrepancies will become a staple of the EU in later works.]
Ooroo, Odan-Urr’s Jedi Master, is a jellyfish who lives inside a crystal filled with fluorescent urine. He tells Odan-Urr that it’s time to stop dicking around with his books and go out into the galaxy and do Jedi stuff. His first assignment is to help Empress Teta defeat a pirate gang to unite the seven worlds of the Koros system. He does this through a long-forgotten Jedi technique called Battle Meditation, which he discovered in some history textbook. Empress Teta and the Jedi are victorious, but in the course of the battle two space pilots, Hok and Timar Daragon, are killed trying to deliver supplies to the empress’s beleaguered troops. Their kids of indeterminate age, Gav and Jori, are supposed to be the main characters, I think, but they kind of end up sharing that position with Odan-Urr and Naga Sadow, whom we have not yet met.
Upon hearing of their parents’ deaths, Gav and Jori resolve to make their dead parents proud by becoming hyperspace navigators and mapping out new spacelanes to unexplored parts of the galaxy for the expanding Republic. The Republic is 20,000 years old at this point, why do they still have mooks like these doing cartography for them? How much more of the galaxy are they going to discover in the 5,000 years left before the movies? Also, everyone dresses like they’re in ancient Egypt and the spaceships look like they’re made out of bundled sticks and mosquito wings. I do not think Kevin J. Anderson had a very good grasp of the Star Wars timescale.
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What a piece of junk! |
[Continuity Note: The archaic aesthetic of the Republic’s wardrobe in the Tales of the Jedi series was retconned in the Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide (2008) to be a retro-fashion trend. It’s described as a “brief revival,” so either the sword-and-sandals look came back into vogue multiple times or clothing styles in Star Wars can last for a thousand years. That they even felt the need to explain the characters’ fashion in this 1990s comic book is kind of dumb, but also kind of hilarious. The EU in a nutshell.]
Brother-and-sister hyperspace explorers Gav and Jori Daragon are Jedi washouts with rudimentary training in the Force, but despite this advantage they suck at their job. Mapping new routes through hyperspace is dangerous work and instead of finding any useful shortcuts, they mostly just end up damaging their ship, the Starbreaker 12, and almost dying. They’ve had to sell their house to pay for the repairs to the ship, so when their latest endeavor turns out to be another failure, starship repairman Aarrba the Hutt refuses to extend them any more credit and confiscates the Starbreaker 12. Now homeless and penniless, the Daragons find themselves beset by hitmen hired by a merchant, who is a giant yellow lizard, because he lost a shipment of cargo using one of their crappy hyperroutes.
Well actually Gav is first accosted alone, then we cut to the lizard merchant hiring the same hitmen we just saw going after Gav, then we cut to the Daragons who are just hanging out being homeless when they’re attacked by those same goddamn hitmen again for the first time in a completely different scene. Was the first attack some kind of glimpse into a parallel world? I have no idea what’s happening.
“Anything for kicks!” says Gav as he kicks one of the assassins. The Daragons run down an alley only to find their way blocked by a brick wall. “Life has been just full of dead ends lately,” says Jori. Fortunately for the Daragons but unfortunately for clever writing, Odan-Urr and his Jedi partner, Memit Nadill, show up and save them. Despite being a huge nerd with an anxiety disorder, or perhaps because of that fact, Odan-Urr brutally murders one of the hitmen after he has already been disarmed, prompting Memit Nadill to gently tell him that in the future he might not want to do that.
[Continuity Note: When the Jedi confront the assassins, we see that the lightsabers of this era are powered by a cord that runs from the bottom of the weapon’s hilt to a power pack on each Jedi’s belt. This is a ridiculous weapon design and I love it. I don’t know if the EU ever set a hard date for when the lightsaber was supposed to have been invented, but Kevin J. Anderson must have thought one of two things: either the Jedi didn’t use their signature weapon for the majority of their history, or they spent 20,000 years using a weapon that was useless without an extension cord.
[The corded lightsaber design, or “protosaber” as Wookieepedia calls it even though it’s called a lightsaber in the comic, becomes even more comical with Dawn of the Jedi’s premature introduction of the Forcesaber. Was it really that hard for the Jedi to take out the Forcesaber’s “dark side-only” switch without having to add a giant external battery? (Even better, players of the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO have the opportunity to travel to Tython and find the first lightsaber ever built, known as the First Blade. It looks like a modern lightsaber.)]
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“Not as clumsy or random as a blaster, as long as you charge it in an AC outlet every night.” |
Knowing it’s only a matter of time before the murderers strike again, Gav and Jori steal back the Starbreaker 12, determined to try one last hyperspace jump and hope for the best. They randomly spin the dial (why is there a dial?) and end up finding the Sith.
Welcome to Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil planet in the galaxy (later renamed “Moraband” by George Lucas because he was afraid viewers would confuse Korriban with Coruscant, which shows how little he thinks of you). And Jesus, speaking of things looking like ancient Egypt, it’s shocking the Sith don’t pass a Great Sphinx or Abu Simbel on their way to entomb the body of Marka Ragnos, their dear departed Dark Lord, in the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Ragnos has two potential successors vying for his throne: Ludo “Bagman” Kressh, politically conservative isolationist, and Naga Sadow, incautious expansionist. Sadow is the central villain of this story but we spend so much time with him, watching him put one over on the other Sith Lords as well as our heroes, that he’s pretty much a protagonist in his own right. Not that that really means anything since all four main characters are just handfuls of barely fleshed-out traits and goals, but at the very least Naga Sadow is a slightly more interesting character than Gav frigging Daragon.
Ludo Kressh and Naga Sadow confront one another on the steps of Marka Ragnos’s tomb, their Sith swords pulsing with purple lightning for . . . some reason. (Why does Ludo Kressh look like Dr. Zaius?) But just then the ghost of Marka Ragnos manifests before them, briefly recapping Sith history for new readers and warning that the Sith Empire’s golden age is at risk if his successor is unworthy. He then fades back into the Netherworld of the Force. Thanks for nothing, Marky Mark!
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“Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil’s pawn.” |
It is at this moment that the Starbreaker 12 lands on the planet. Gav and Jori Daragon disembark with huge smiles and bid this unknown tribe of sinister-looking primitives greetings from the Republic. They are immediately taken prisoner. Ludo Kressh claims that this is a sure sign the Republic is going to invade them and they should execute the Daragons immediately because that will help them somehow.
Naga Sadow sees the strangers as an opportunity to seize power, however, and makes a rousing speech about how this is a chance for the Sith to expand their territory and conquer the entire galaxy. Since Kevin J. Anderson doesn’t know how to write rousing speeches, however, all we see are several panels of Naga Sadow waving his hand in the air while the other Sith Lords look on pensively, then he concludes, “And that is our destiny!”
I guess that was completely pointless though because we immediately cut to the Daragons in prison and Lord Simus comes to tell them the Sith voted to execute them anyway. Off-handedly introduced in a narration box a few pages earlier, Simus, one of the most revered of the Sith Lords, is a severed head in a jar. He was decapitated in a duel with Marka Ragnos centuries earlier but used the Force to keep his head alive. Now some guy has to carry it around everywhere because he doesn’t have legs. Because he’s a head.
Fuck Star Wars.
Naga Sadow comes up with a cockamamie scheme to win the other Sith over to his side. Stealing blasters from the Starbreaker 12, he and his followers storm the prison to free the Daragons, murdering all the guards they come across and leaving the blasters behind to make it look like a Republic invasion. On the way out they come across Simus, who I guess just likes hanging out in jails all day. Simus is like “OMG Naga Sadow my best friend! What’s going on! Are you okay!” and Naga Sadow just shoots him.
In the head.
The Sith Lords convene another meeting and Naga Sadow
convinces them that they must strike back at the Republic and elect him as the
new Dark Lord to do it. The Sith are like
“Sure, I guess that makes sense” and they put little scorpions on Naga Sadow’s
face that tattoo his forehead with a little symbol and then he’s the new Dark
Lord. Meanwhile Jori Daragon is like, “Naga Sadow, where’s my brother? You
split us up after you rescued us and haven’t allowed us to see one another at
all since then. You’re acting . . . kind of suspicious!” But Naga Sadow is
like, “No, it’s cool, I’m the good guy, trust me” and Jori’s like, “Okay.”
But Ludo Kressh is having none of this crap and launches an attack on Naga Sadow’s fortress on the planet Khar Delba. Naga Sadow gives Jori back the Starbreaker 12 and tells her she must escape back to the Republic. She refuses to leave without her brother but Naga Sadow tells her she has to so se does.
Ludo Kressh is all, “Naga Sadow, I will trounce you!” but Naga Sadow is like, “You fool! You’ve attacked my decoy fortress! My real fortress is in another castle!” and he has a bunch of ships fly out from behind the moon and they blow up Ludo Kressh’s fleet. Naga Sadow has always treated the Sith warrior caste with kindness or something (he’s a real man of the people) so the crewmen of several of Kressh’s ships assassinate their Sith Lord masters and bring their ships over to Naga Sadow’s side. Now secure in his rule over the Sith Empire, Naga Sadow readies his forces to follow Jori back to Republic space, using the tracking device he planted on Starbreaker 12 that looks like a frog for no reason.
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| Sadow and Kressh, looking way more badass than they do at any point in this stupid comic. |
Also somewhere in all of this Odan-Urr had a dream that the
Sith were returning and tried to warn the Republic but no one would believe him
except Empress Teta and Memit Nadill, and then that was the end of that
subplot. Anyway, THE END according to the last page of the comic, even though
the cliffhanger clearly means it’s TO BE CONTINUED.
Meditations
This story arc and its immediate follow-up, The Fall of the Sith Empire, are actually prequels to the original run of Tales of the Jedi comics. And in proud Star Wars prequel tradition, they completely ignore or contradict certain key elements of the original stories. Chief among these is the nature of the Sith Empire and its history with the Republic, but that history has been written and rewritten so many times it’s hard to care.
Chris Gossett’s art in the first (or zeroth, if you want to acknowledge its comic-book gimmickry) issue is pretty terrible, but once Dario Carrasco takes over it improves dramatically. It might even be the best artwork we’ve seen so far, but it’s spoiled by an uninspired coloring job. Carrasco’s panels contain a fair amount of detailing, but at some point in the production process somebody got lazy and thought it would be easier to just click the “Fill With Color” button on a bunch of background stuff in Microsoft Paint.
As a result you end up with ships, buildings, planets, and creatures that are each only one or two shades of single color, creating a monochromatic vibe that infects the whole comic. The color palette is dominated by golds and browns and beiges, and even the more vibrant colors that appear in clothing and skin tones have a bleached, sickly look. On top of their ridiculous tentacle mustaches, the Sith appear even less threatening here when their skin color shifts from the lobster-red we saw in Dawn of the Jedi to a uniform pale pink. This is the closest we’ll ever get to an origin story for the ultimate evil in the old EU and they just look comical.
That said, I could overlook the lackluster color scheme if the writing were up to snuff, but lol no. I haven’t taken the time to count his writer credits but Kevin J. Anderson may well be the most prolific author in the Expanded Universe. He is also one of the worst. His work in comics isn’t as dire as some of the prose stories we’ll eventually get to, probably because all he has to worry about is dialogue while the art carries the thrust of the story, but the writing in this comic really has nothing to recommend it. It’s simplistic and functional and the personality it does inject into the characters’ voices often feels silly or stylized after the fashion of an unambitious children’s cartoon. Wait why am I acting surprised that a mid-’90s Star Wars comic book reads like it was written for children? One of the characters is a talking severed head in a jar. Fuck this comic, fuck Star Wars, fuck everything.
2/5 Death Stars. Still more fun than the last Dawn of the Jedi arc.
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