The Secret Journal of Doctor Demagol
Author: John Jackson Miller
Medium: Short Story
Publication Date: April 2010 on StarWars.com (republished on
Unbound Worlds)
Timeline Placement: 3,964 – 3,963 BBY
This first-person series of journal entries spans the entire run of the Knights of the Old Republic comic
and retells many scenes from Demagol’s point of view, in addition to
revealing what he was up to while off-screen. Unlike the previous two KotOR
shorts, “Labor Pains” and “Interference,” which didn’t really bring
much to the table beyond being fun diversions, this story offers new
insights on Demagol’s behavior and thought process while disguised as
Rohlan and alleviates the lack of overt characterization caused by his
subterfuge.
There are a few points of interest that change things we thought we
knew from the comics. When Demagol calls up Mandalore to invite him to
Adasca’s auction, he lets him know who he really is instead of sticking
to the Rohlan disguise. So when Mandalore gives him the new suit of
armor that Demagol promptly throws away, it adds kind of a little
comedic twist on the scene. I guess not really though.
There’s also a line where Demagol muses how Squint would be lucky to
leave his laboratory with nothing more than an elongated spine. I’m not
sure if this is supposed to be an explanation on Miller’s part for why
Malak is so much taller in the videogame than in the comic or just a
callback to Alek’s joke in Flashpoint about being a little taller after getting off the torture rack.
At this point I don’t care, however. The best thing about this story
is getting inside Demagol’s head and basically revisiting the entire
series from his point of view. In that way it serves both as sort of a
“greatest hits” and as an overdue exploration of a major character who
we didn’t realize was a major character until shortly before he died.
It’s a cool narrative device and Demagol gets a lot of great funny
and/or evil lines. “It is a wonder anyone is ever born.”
4/5 Death Stars, an acceptable coda to the series.
Knights of the Old Republic: War
Author: John Jackson Miller
Artist: Andrea Mutti
Medium: Comic
Publication Date: January – May 2012
Timeline Placement: 3,962 BBY
John Jackson Miller’s intent for Knights of the Old Republic originally
encompassed three distinct story arcs. In the first, Zayne Carrick was a
fugitive from injustice, framed by his teachers for the murders of his
fellow Padawans and on a quest to clear his name, all set against the
backdrop of the opening salvos of the Mandalorian Wars. In the second,
Zayne was a freelance do-gooder who traveled around righting wrongs that
escaped the Republic’s notice, culminating with helping Jarael overcome
the past she was running from and vanquish the evil she was once a part
of.
The third arc was to shift focus,
foregrounding the ongoing war and throwing Zayne into the role of a
hapless soldier, left adrift without his friends to bail him out of
trouble. I’ve remarked several times throughout these reviews that the
story arcs more involved with the macro-conflict of the Mandalorian
Wars, like Flashpoint and Days of Fear, were some of
my favorites, so making the war the central plot of the series instead
of something Zayne happened to stumble into from time to time could
potentially have been a very cool narrative shift.
So of course Dark Horse canceled the series for no reason right before it was going to happen.
I should note that I’m not overly bitter about this because KotOR already had a long run and Demon
wrapped things up so well. As nice as it would have been to see Zayne’s
continuing adventures go on for another 20-30 issues, the fact that we
missed out on a series set during the Mandalorian Wars actually being
about the Mandalorian Wars isn’t my biggest complaint here. It’s that if
they weren’t going to let John Jackson Miller do it the way he wanted,
they shouldn’t have done it at all.
Because War kind of sucks. Like a lot.
Shortly after the events of KotOR
#50, Zayne’s family moved from Dantooine back to their homeworld of
Phaeda. Zayne attempted to visit them but immediately upon setting foot
on the planet he was drafted by the Republic. He’s now under the command
of Dallan Morvis, Saul Karath’s henchman from the main series. Zayne is
the worst soldier ever, though. He refuses to carry a gun or kill
anybody, so instead of court-martialing him or making him a support
staff member or just allowing him to refuse to serve on the grounds
that he’s a pacifist, they just let him carry his lightsaber and run
around the battlefield doing whatever.
No wonder the Republic’s losing this war.
The Jedi Master working with Morvis’s
detachment is former High Councillor Dorjander Kace, but in a twist that
no one could have seen coming, Kace and his three Charlie’s Angels Jedi
associates (if Charlie’s Angels were weird-looking alien chicks) betray
Zayne and the others to the Mandalorians. Zayne, Morvis, and the rest
are pressed into service as Neo-Crusaders under the command of Kace, who
uses the captured Republic frigate Reciprocity to infiltrate and take over Republic installations.
Zayne still refuses to fight, however. You’d
think the Mandalorians would just shoot him for cowardice and move on,
but for some reason both sides are really intent on sabotaging
themselves by forcing an unpredictable element into volatile combat
situations. Zayne tries his best to save lives by disarming the
outnumbered Republic soldiers with his lightsaber, but somehow he’s
unable to foresee that the Mandalorians would just shoot them all
anyway. It’s like they’re in a war or something!
Despite his inappropriate and inopportune
moral dilemma, Zayne has made an ally of Koblus Sornell, the Mandalorian
communications officer we briefly met in “Interference,”
by saving her and her son from Morvis’s troops before they were
captured. Who didn’t want to see her again, right? He persuades her to
send a message to Gryph’s Coruscant eatery. Gryph answers the phone
wearing a top hat, which would be a great image if the art weren’t so
lackluster. The cameo only lasts a single page, but seeing Gryph’s
flourishing restaurant business, along with Elbee (looking depressed as
ever) and Slyssk in the background, is like looking through a window
onto a more entertaining story.
Gryph reads up on Dorjander Kace and gives
Zayne the skinny on his history. Kace was captured by the Mandalorians
during the Great Sith War and apparently went native while in their
company. When Revan dragged the Jedi into the new war, Kace saw an
opportunity to even the odds for his adopted people by bringing
Force-users over to their side as well. Zayne realizes that he plans to
attack the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine and induct all the students there
into the Mandalorian forces.
He persuades Sornell to turn a blind eye to
his activities, because splitting up families and harming children is
anathema to Mandalorian culture apparently (I wonder how many children
were on Serroco and Cathar).
Using bile rat stew to make it look like his and his fellow escapees’
brains are leaking out of their heads, Zayne hijacks a Mandalorian
dreadnought and makes a beeline for Dantooine, where Kace’s Mandalorian
Knights have already subdued the Jedi instructors (including KotOR NPC Zhar Lestin in his first speaking role of the series) and rounded up the children.
Disguised as Mandalorians, Zayne and the
others are almost able to con the Jedi turncoats into allowing the
students to go with them while the Mandalorian Knights go off on a
mission for Mandalore, but in one of the comic’s few humorous bits,
Morvis accidentally gives them away and Zayne slaps himself on his
armored forehead, unable to withstand the stupidity. (I know how he
feels.) Zayne blows up their stolen Mandalorian landing craft, however,
buying enough time for Morvis to escape with the students in Reciprocity while he duels Dorjander Kace.
Kace is about to kill him when Sornell shows
up and pulls a gun on the Mandalorian Knight, telling him that his
backup troops aren’t coming. Despite Mandalore the Ultimate’s orders,
they’re refusing to have anything more to do with Jedi magic after the
“Jedi brain fever” they witnessed among the crew who stole their
dreadnought. Superstition wins out against pragmatism, just like always.
Kace refuses to back down, however, even if
he has to kill Zayne and Sornell both. But Sornell informs him that she
is pregnant, and Zayne reminds Kace of his own pregnant Mandalorian wife
who was killed by a Jedi during the war. “Perhaps . . . perhaps this
wasn’t the way,” he admits. He relents and is taken into custody by the
Dantooine Masters.
“When you were a pupil here,” Zhar Lestin confesses to Zayne, “I never thought you would become a Jedi. I see now that I was right—you seem to have become something more.”
Dorjander Kace is taken to stand trial in
the same chamber where Demagol didn’t. He talks for nine hours about how
corrupt the Republic and the Jedi are. “I think they’re going to have
to come up with something else for the next Jedi who goes wrong,”
comments Zayne. Oh we know they will!
Zayne finally makes it to Phaeda to see his
family and finds his sisters showing embarrassing baby pictures to
Jarael. “So what am I supposed to be, the big reward at the end of your
story?” she asks. Well . . . yeah.
Zayne joins the Republic Navy as a special
diplomatic agent attached to Captain Morvis’s command, a job he
describes as being the crew’s “official conscience.” “And the fight goes on . . .” promises the concluding textbox as the Reciprocity sails off to meet the Mandalorian forces. That may be true, but we’re not going along for the ride.
 |
All right, this is kind of cool I guess. |
Meditations
Going from Demon to War is like playing the expansion pack Dragon Age Origins: Awakening immediately
after finishing the main game. Sure, the setting and the main character
are the same, but without the party of companions you’ve gotten to know
and love over the course of the adventure, who cares? It turns out
that, without Gryph and Jarael around to play off of, Zayne isn’t all
that compelling a character.
His Batman-esque refusal to take a life, an
endearing trait when he was an independent agent contending with various
foes on the fringes of the Republic, just comes off really annoying
when he’s a soldier. The frontline is no place for your conscientious
objection, Zayne. You’re going to get someone killed trying to
force your ethics down their throat. I lost track of how many times he
tells someone, on both the Republic and Mandalorian sides, “you don’t
have to do this.” It’s a war for cultural survival between two
irreconcilably different civilizations, you twit; if you’re not going to
fight, just mind-trick the draft board and walk away.
But despite everything he has to go through
in this book to get back to his girlfriend and family, in the end he
decides that the armed forces is the best place for him to be after all.
I don’t know if the author was planning on writing more tales about
Zayne’s military service that never materialized because of the Disney
buyout and reboot, but this is a pretty crummy place to end the story.
It undoes all the resolution from the end of Demon in favor of a
new status quo that doesn’t even fit with the themes and characters of
the main series. Zayne Carrick is a nice guy who helps people who are
down on their luck like he once was. That’s what he was doing at the end
of issue 50, and that’s what we should have left him to do once the
story was done.
Also the art blows chunks. The only cool-looking character is a Togorian Mandalorian named Kra’ake.
Everyone else looks so beady-eyed and ugly. Zayne doesn’t even look
like Zayne. You know, I take back every negative thing I ever said about
Brian Ching’s art. It’s fantastic. It’s no Dustin Weaver, but it’s
still fantastic. Please bring him back to redraw this comic.
Actually just don’t make this comic at all.
Everything about it is redundant, unnecessary, and pointless. A good
story always leaves you wanting more rather than knowing too much.
1/5 Death Stars. Truly disappointing.
Knights of the Old Republic Series Retrospective
We’ve now reached the end of the Knights of the Old Republic
series. After 56 comic issues and three short stories, the story of
Zayne Carrick, Marn Hierogryph, “the fierce warrior woman” Jarael, and
all their wacky friends is at an end. So was the journey worth all the
time it took? In a word, yes. Like I said way back in my review of the
first arc of the series, Commencement, John Jackson Miller’s Knights of the Old Republic is a pretty good Star Wars comic overall, so there’s only so much to snark about.
Most complaints I have about this series
involve downturns in the artwork, contradictions and inconsistencies
with the videogames, and the occasional boring subplot. And also, I
guess, not knowing where to stop (see above). Taken as a
whole, however, this series probably stands as one of the EU’s best, if
not at being literature then at being Star Wars. It’s a distinction that will become clearer the farther down the rabbit hole we find ourselves.
Flashpoint, Days of Fear, Knights of Suffering, Vindication, and Demon all stick out in my mind as fantastic arcs, while Commencement, Homecoming, Exalted, Turnabout, Faithful Execution, and Destroyer are all quality additions as well. The space slug subplot, Vector,
and the first half of the Crucible arc are the major low points, but
despite all the criticisms I’ve made along the way, if you’re looking
for light-hearted adventures with fun characters set in one of the
coolest eras of the Star Wars universe, you really can’t go wrong with this series. Just stop reading before you get to War; it is not worth it.
But now that the series is done, and ended
on a less conclusive and satisfactory note than we might have hoped,
what became of that diverse cast of memorable characters we got to know
over those 56 issues and three (well, at least two) short stories?
Saul Karath and
Dallan Morvis were
eventually married, but their partnership ended prematurely after
Morvis shaved his mustache and Karath not only failed to notice, but,
when pressed, insisted that Morvis had never even had a mustache to
begin with.
Cassus Fett sparred with
Revan and Malak at the Battle of Jaga’s Cluster, where he murdered a
Republic fleet captain in hand-to-hand combat and became the most wanted
man in the galaxy for consistently wearing
battle armor that looked nothing like the armor he was
famous for.
After being placed on academic probation
following complaints of wanton destruction of property and inappropriate
sexual conduct, Mandalore the Ultimate and the bros of
Sigma Chi decided to throw one last LAN party before they were kicked
off campus. He eventually met his end at Malachor V in a tragic accident
with a beerzooka.
Shel Jelavan continued to
serve as Senator Goravvus’s intern until allegations of workplace misconduct put a
premature end to his political career. Shel became a pop culture
celebrity due to her role in the scandal but eventually retired from the
public spotlight to design her own line of handbags.
Dr. Gorman Vandrayk continued
living among the space slugs, and was eventually crowned their king.
The ceremony was somewhat confusing due to the space slugs’ lack of
hands, crowns, language, and any concept of formal society. He never
went camping a day in his life.
T1-LB moved into the
basement of Goodvalor’s Little Bivoli, where he sat staring morosely at
the same spot on the floor until all his friends forgot he was alive.
He’d never been happier.
Rohlan Dyre kept his
promise to Cassus Fett and did not reveal that “the Questioner” was
still alive and well. He refused to abandon his investigation into the
origin of the Mandalorian Wars, however, and eventually uncovered the
truth: that all along Mandalore the Ultimate had been a pawn of EA Games
used to promote their upcoming MMO. He currently appears as Vic Sage at
conventions.
Demagol is fucking dead.
Irritated at not being being asked to return for the series’s second story arc, Del and Dob Moomo embarked
on a galaxy-wide shooting rampage that killed no one. Satisfied that
they’d made their point, they returned to their life of bounty hunting
aboard the Moomo Williwaw, their reputations improbably better than ever. Del is the proud father of twelve bombs, all of them named Brabwa.
Slyssk became an Internet meme and parlayed his newfound fame into a reality dating show on VH1. Called
Scales of Love,
it was canceled after only one season when some ancestral instinct in
his reptilian forebrain overrode his gentle nature and caused him to
devour the winning contestant live on camera. He currently stars in the
reality cooking competition
Hell’s Kitchen on Fox.
Marn “Gryph” Hierogryph, alias
Baron Hieromarn,
Remulus Horne,
Professor Gryphomarn,
Donald J. Trump, and
Bulgryph Mandrake, continued
to manage his restaurant franchise until it became apparent that he had
no idea what he was doing. Goodvalor’s was eventually shut down for
170,000 health code violations, but by that point Gryph had already made
his fortune and retired to operate a men’s clothing warehouse and party
costume emporium. One of his aliases has been named the richest
sentient being in the galaxy by
Space Forbes every year since.
Zayne and
Jarael went
on to have many more misadventures together, beginning with Zayne’s
desertion from the Republic Navy when Captain Dallan Morvis was driven
mad by his crew’s insistence that he had never had a mustache. Each new
adventure somehow seemed to involve Jarael dressing in slutty costumes
and getting kidnapped by crazed stalkers, while Zayne saved the day by
flailing around being ineffectual and getting beaten up. In essence,
they were the perfect couple, and they lived happily ever after (more or
less), until the end of their days.
And of course Malak and Carth Onasi kept very, very busy. But that’s another story.
