Sexy Teens with Dumb Names in the Post-Apocalypse, Part 1 of 100

This is a show in which sexy delinquent teens are sent to wild Earth, far away from their stupid parents in their stupid suburban space satellite. There is love, there is death, there is an older generation who just doesn’t understand. It’s the teen adventure of a lifetime. Come along with me, won’t you?

It’s 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse rendered the earth uninhabitable and the remnants the human race live aboard a giant space station called the Ark, which they presumably borrowed from the Autobots because they are giant space robots who can survive in radiation, or maybe from John Cusack at the end of 2012. Or maybe from Noah. Is the Ark even a viable allusion anymore?

In the series’ first (and, as of the end of this episode, only) nod to scientific accuracy, the station is made of giant rotating wheels, which create artificial gravity for the people living inside them. One of those people is our lead character, a pretty blonde girl named CLARK, which is a terrible name for anyone whose last name isn’t Kent so right off the bat I have high hopes for this show. She fills us in on the back story of the series via voiceover narration while drawing a mural on the floor with colored chalk. It will take another 100 years before the earth’s radiation level subsides enough for humans to live on it again, but they’re going to do it anyway in about three minutes.

Some tough-looking dudes in uniforms burst into Clark’s room and it turns out Clark has been locked up in juvie for the past year. She starts whining at them that they can’t kill her because she’s only 17, hoping they won’t notice that she’s clearly 25. Clark beats up the two burly security guards . . . somehow . . . and escapes, but then CLARK’S MOM appears and tells her that she and the other prisoners aren’t being executed, they’re being sent to Earth! Then someone injects Clark with something and she passes out.

“Pretty but vacant” is the defining characteristic of a strong female young adult protagonist in any medium.

After the title sequence, Clark and the Ark’s 99 other juvenile delinquents awaken on the spacecraft carrying them down to the planet. A pre-recorded message from the PRESIDENT OF SPACE, an African American Arkian (?) gentleman played by the guy who was fired from Grey’s Anatomy for being a homophobe, plays on a TV, telling the eponymous 100 what an important thing they’re doing for the future of their species. The president’s son, PRESIDENT JR., is sitting next to Clark. He explains that he somehow got himself arrested so he could apologize to her for turning her father in to the police and getting him executed, and he hopes she’s not still mad at him for that. Clark tells him to fuck off.

Some of the kids take off their seatbelts and start floating around in zero-g, even though everyone’s hair is hanging normally around their faces. Clark whines at them to strap back in but then the ship crashes for some reason (srsly I have no idea why) and two of them are killed instantly. So five minutes into the first episode the show’s title is already out of date. The CW should have just used the title as a running tally of how many characters are still alive and updated the title card and promotional material every week to reflect that. As far as I’m concerned The 100 is now called The 98.

After ten minutes of breakneck exposition, the show finally pauses to take a breath and introduce some more of the main cast. There is BELLAMY BLAKE, a bad-boy rebel who stowed away on the ship to reunite with his sister, OCTAVIA BLAKE, a sexy brunette who was imprisoned for violating the one-child-per-family law (as we are informed by unseen characters shouting “That’s the girl they hid under the floor!” and, twenty seconds later, “That’s Octavia Blake, the girl they found hidden under the floor!” in what may be the worst sound mixing ever to air on TV). There is FLYNN RIDER, another bad-boy rebel, who was arrested for stealing oxygen for “an illegal space walk.” He instigated the redshirts who died in the crash but he might secretly have a heart of gold . . . if he can decide which of the two leading ladies it belongs to! There is JASPER, a hipster doofus who wears goggles as a fashion accessory, and his friend, ASIAN GUY, who is good with computers, because of course he is. They were arrested for smoking weed. Also there is some guy whose name might be ERIC, who has it in for President Jr. for some reason I can’t remember but might be because Space Obama had his parents killed too. Apparently this society has a habit of killing people’s parents and then sending the kids to jail because they don’t know what else to do with them. It’s good to see the American justice system is still alive and well after the atomic holocaust.

Octavia Blake, 28-year-old teenage sexpot/girl in the floor.

Bellamy Blake starts trying to force the spaceship’s door open so they don’t suffocate or burn to death but Clark whines at him about the radiation. Bellamy is all like, “Bitch, no,” and opens the door anyway. The 98 step outside and set foot on Earth for the first time in what I would think would be kind of a solemn moment but then Octavia, overjoyed at being sent to a slow death by radiation poisoning, screams, “We’re back, bitches!” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” starts playing, because contemporary pop music is the most appropriate soundtrack for a post-apocalyptic science fiction show.

Meanwhile, back on the Ark, we are introduced to DESMOND FROM LOST, the vice president and apparently the antagonist of the show. It’s weird hearing him talk with an American accent, his voice sounds way higher and thinner than it did on Lost. Someone alerts Clark’s mom that Space Obama was shot by Bellamy Blake earlier that day and I guess they just found out. Clark’s mom immediately starts shouting this disastrous information at everyone within earshot. Jeez, lady, you think you might want to keep that one under your hat for a minute? Seriously though I hope he dies so Desmond can take over. Desmond’s friend/adviser/minion tells him, “Desmond, now that you’re president you can start killing people immediately.” One of the perks of the job, I guess. But Desmond’s like no, if we’re going to kill everyone we have to wait for Space Obama to die so we can do it legally.

“I’ll see ya in another despotic regime, brotha!”

On Earth, two characters call Clark “Princess” entirely independent of one another.

Back in space, Clark’s mom is a doctor I guess and she breaks the law by giving Space Obama too much blood, so Desmond has her arrested because in the future “all crimes are capital crimes.” KELLY HU, Desmond’s adviser?/assistant?/girlfriend?, makes an impassioned plea for her life because they are BFFs, and damn now that Desmond’s basically president you’d think he could afford some nice shirts that haven’t been gnawed at by space moths. All the kids on Earth look like they just walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch. (I am glad though that the one resource we won’t be short on after the apocalypse is hair product.)

“You all think I’m the bad guy but I’m the only one willing to do what it takes to save us,” Desmond says with a condescending smirk, because he’s Desmond From Lost and he’s awesome. He then orders his guards to fire Clark’s mom’s ass out an airlock. Clark’s mom has been trying to devise a way to communicate with the 98 via the vital signs monitors in their wristbands. As she is dragged away to her doom, she shouts instructions at some scientist guy for how to continue the operation and tells him “Nod if you understand!” Um, why couldn’t he just answer her normally? Desmond’s standing right there watching, none of this is getting past him. The guy nods anyway though and Clark’s mom is about to get “floated” when Space Obama comes staggering down the hallway in his hospital gown and officially pardons her for wasting valuable medical resources to save a single person’s life. So he can just do that, huh? And he just let his son get arrested and shipped off to Earth anyway. Not to mention executing Clark’s dad for, as will later be revealed, doing nothing wrong. Space Obama is kind of an asshole.

On Earth, everyone looks tan and healthy despite living on a space station for a hundred years. Clark has salvaged a map from the crash and is trying to plot a course to Mount Weather, the site of the old government bunker they were supposed to land near. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Flynn Rider asks her. What, to draw a line on a map? Clark starts whining at everyone that they need to gather food and hike to the mountain so they can tell Space Obama that it’s safe to send more people down. Someone needs to tell this girl that she’s never going to get ahead giving head to the man. “Let the privileged do the hard work for a change,” suggests Bellamy Blake, founding member of Occupy Post-Apocalyptic Earth. Realizing that an unsupervised group of delinquent teenagers may not be the most altruistic people she could ask for help, Clark resolves to head off by herself.

President Jr. attempts to follow her but is confronted by that Eric guy who is about to beat the shit out of him until Flynn Rider steps in and points out that President Jr.’s leg was injured in the crash. Since murderous thugs are known for nothing if not their strong sense of honor, Eric backs off. “Hey, Space Walker,” Octavia says to Flynn. “Rescue me next.” This dialogue.

Flynn Rider, dreamboat.

Clark heads out and is joined by Flynn Rider because he wants to bang her, Octavia because she wants to bang Flynn Rider, Jasper the Hipster Doofus because he wants to bang Octavia, and Asian Guy because he’s Jasper’s wingman I guess. At least if they get lost they can just follow their trail of pheromones back to camp. After trading arrest stories, one of the dynamic duo asks, “What’d they get you for, Octavia?” Dude, were you not paying attention?

As they trek across the wilderness, they behold the majesty and wonder of this brave new world, such as a mutant two-faced deer covered in tumors. They come across a river and Octavia strips down to her underwear, prompting Jasper to exclaim his love for Earth because lmao he’s so horny. Before the others can join Octavia in the water, however, she is eaten by a giant catfish. Oh wait nvm, she survived, the catfish just smeared some red paint on her leg. Jasper pulls her out of the water and is rewarded for his heroism with a brief hug, giving Asian Guy the opening he’s been waiting for to joke, “Note to self: next time, save the girl.” Everyone laughs.

Back at the camp, President Jr. is further harassed by Eric and his crew but fends them off by making fun of a spelling error in their graffitied death threat. They are then recruited by Bellamy to serve as his enforcers. Bellamy abducts President Jr. at gunpoint and marches him out into the woods where the goon squad holds him down and pulls off his wristband while President Jr. screams like he’s being gang raped instead of just getting his bracelet stolen. Bellamy has decided to make himself the leader of this fledgling non-society and the easiest way to maintain their isolation is by getting everyone to remove their wristbands so the people on the Ark will stop receiving their vital signs and assume the radiation levels are still too high for humans to survive. To celebrate their independence, the 98 minus Clark’s party throw a big pep rally around a bonfire. I don’t know how they have the energy for this since they all belittled Clark when she suggested they look for food earlier that morning. Shouldn’t they all be busy starving to death right now?

As Clark’s gang journeys on toward Mount Weather, we get yet another scene of expository dialogue wherein Clark reveals that her father was an engineer on the Ark who discovered that they were running out of oxygen far more quickly than was generally believed. He thought the station’s citizens had a right to know the truth but Clark blabbed to President Jr., resulting in her father’s arrest and execution before he could tell anyone. Clark was then incarcerated in solitary confinement for a year but instead of losing her mind she just came out of it looking like a girl on a CW show.

They come upon another river but rather than risk attack by another mutated creature that the script calls a snake even though the animation didn’t look anything like a snake, they decide to swing across it on a vine, which is apparently just hanging down directly from the sky rather than any of the nearby trees. Flynn Rider is about to go first because he’s the daredevil, but Jasper convinces him to switch places with him so he can impress Octavia. Jasper swings across and discovers a conveniently placed sign for Mount Weather lying on the ground right where he landed. The celebration is cut short, however, when, with a cry of “DIE, HIPSTER SCUM,” a wooden spear comes hurtling out of nowhere and strikes Jasper directly in the chest, lifting him off his feet and carrying him backward through the air to collide with a tree. Finally. The only way this scene could have been better is if the spear had impaled him directly through his stupid goggles. Clark and the others take cover behind some logs and Clark announces forebodingly, “We’re not alone,” which is the least helpful thing anyone could say in this situation. Cut to title card, end of Episode 1.

It was all worth it.

I came off this episode feeling pretty high but the preview for the next episode already spoiled that Jasper is apparently, improbably, still alive and that they find E.T.’s skull so now I don’t know what to believe. Suffice it to say that, based on my expectation of CW programming, The 98 did not let me down. The premise of the show has potential, which I don’t expect to ever be fully realized, and the cast, while kind of bland, is serviceable for the subject matter and acceptably pretty. The writing is atrocious but no one expects good writing from TV, a.k.a. “the idiot box” LOL! So far my favorite character is the spear that almost killed Jasper and my second favorite is the snakefish that almost ate Octavia. I look forward to watching their arcs develop in surprising and satisfying ways over the course of the season.

I will keep watching in the hope that Desmond becomes president and has all the annoying teen characters (mainly just Jasper) lined up and shot, then the show switches gears and becomes about Desmond banging Kelly Hu in space while executing mass segments of the population at sporadic intervals. And also they get someone else to write all the dialogue. It’s a bold new direction for The CW and I for one can’t wait to tune in for more!

The Golden Age of the Sith

Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith

Author: Kevin J. Anderson

Artist: Chris Gossett (Issue 0), Dario Carrasco, Jr. (Issues 1-5)

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July 1996 – February 1997

Timeline Placement: 5,000 BBY

Series: Tales of the Jedi

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.

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.)]

“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!

“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.

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.