Story: Obi-Wan and Alpha, captured by Asajj Ventress after the Battle of Jabiim, make their escape from Asajj’s homeworld of Rattatak. Anakin, temporarily assigned to Master Ki-Adi-Mundi, insists his master is still alive – and when he has the chance to prove he’s right, Ki-Adi-Mundi joins him in a rescue attempt. Across the galaxy, the Clone Wars persist in a stalemate, putting friendships and alliances to the test. The continued crisis motivates the Senate to place power in Palpatine’s hands, leading some Senators and Jedi to wonder how much the Chancellor can be trusted.
Review: This collection features a number of short stories rather than a single primary arc, and with a number of artists and two different writers, it’s very much an anthology – people looking for a more coherent collection might be disappointed. There are two primary tracks to the story. First comes Obi-Wan’s escape and rescue, which is a nicely written action piece. The relationship built up between Obi-Wan and the ARC Trooper called Alpha is put to good use here, and there are some nice background details on Asajj.
The part of the story dealing with Anakin is interesting for two reasons. There’s an attempt at a continuity patch here – when the “Star Wars: Republic” title was launched in 1999 (sans the Republic subtitle), Ki-Adi-Mundi was its central character. Readers were introduced to his wife and children and his home planet – and as we know, Attack of the Clones made that somewhat hard to reconcile with the Jedi Code. Rather than drop it, there’s a shoehorned explanation of how Ki had received an exemption from that particular dictate because of his planet’s low birthrate. It’s an awkward moment, and another one that makes me wish Lucasfilm Licensing wouldn’t be so insistent about trying to fit the entire Expanded Universe into a coherent canon.
More interesting is a bit where Anakin raises the issue of the Jedi’s many contradictions to Ki – he’s told to trust his feelings, but certain feelings are disallowed, and when Anakin says he feels Obi-Wan’s alive, no one believes him. This conversation helps key a plot point later in the story, but more importantly, it highlights the way the Jedi have lost sight of something important, something that makes them ultimately unable to help Anakin with his grief or notice the manipulations going on around them.
Those manipulations are the focus of the three other short stories in this collection. Two are written by Ostrander. One features Bail Organa growing disillusioned with Palpatine as well as a brief return by Finis Valorum, the chancellor Palpatine replaced in Phantom Menace. The other utilizes some interesting backwards storytelling; it begins with the death of a Jedi from Naboo, and as each subsequent scene moves further back into the past, we learn that Palpatine played a key role in leading the Jedi to that moment. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again – I love that the prequels and associated fiction are making Palpatine the smartest man in the galaxy by far. If nothing else, it makes Luke’s triumph in Return of the Jedi that much sweeter.
The final story is written by Jeremy Barlow, and is meant as a spotlight story on Yoda. It’s a pretty good story that reinforces one of the darkest elements of the Clone War stories: there are good people on both sides of the battle, and no matter which side they’re on, it’s the wrong side. So these characters all feel they’re stuck in lesser-of-two-evils situations, and in truth they’re all supporting the same evil – and none of them are taking the bold steps needed to create a third option. The one thing I found grating was Yoda’s dialogue. Difficult to read, every sentence is. Capable of normal sentence construction, Yoda is. Remember this, writers should. The Yoda story is also a bit of a departure artwise – Hoon’s work looks like a mix of Japanese manga-influenced pencil work with computer modeling for the tech, all colored on the computer. It doesn’t look bad by any means, and some of the layouts are actually quite breathtaking, but it’s such a shift from the norm that it’s a little harder to place this story visually in the same universe. (The padawans introduced in this story look much younger than those featured in other stories and, indeed, much younger than the script suggests – but that’s really an issue only if you’re comparing this issue to the others in the collection.)
The pencil art on the other stories is more in keeping with the look the line has established; no surprise since regulars Jan Duursema and Tomas Giorello pencil two of the stories. Brandon Badeaux, who handles the other two, is pretty good, although his likenesses of the film characters sometimes come off a little too narrow and angled – although some of that could come down to the inking as well. Duursema continues to be my favorite of the Clone Wars artists, so it’s a little disappointing to see only one story from her in this volume; that disappointment aside, there’s still plenty of good material in this collection and a nice breather before the next batch of arcs leading up to Revenge of the Sith.
Year: 2005
Writers: John Ostrander, Jeremy Barlow
Pencillers:Jan Duursema, Tomas Giorello, Brandon Badeaux, Hoon
Inkers:Dan Parsons, Armando Durruthy, Brandon Badeaux, Hoon
Colorists:Brad Anderson, Hoon
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Pages: 144