‘Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Quest Of The Jedi’ One-Shot Review

Star Wars has always been a fun part of our culture. I remember watching IV, V, and VI on VHS when I was a kid. I saw the first of the prequels in the theater with the daughter of a local comic shop owner. She was an older goth 20-something, and I was a dorky teenager who ran D&D games in the backroom of the shop.

It felt really cool to be invited to go with her and the guy who said he was dating her, even if that guy made mean faces at me all night. I would later learn that I was invited on something he thought was a date, and it was somehow my fault. Nevertheless, none of that dampened the moment when Darth Maul ignited the twin blades of his lightsaber, and the theater lost its freaking mind.

Those old trappings of the High Republic that were present in Episode I always make me smile. That age of the Star Wars timeline, where things feel more like Science Fantasy than Science Fiction, where the Jedi feel like actual space knights out protecting galactic kingdoms, just speaks to me.

That brings us to this offering from Dark Horse, a one-shot called Quest of the Jedi, written by Claudia Gray with art by Fico Ossio. The story drops us into the middle of the legendary Jedi Knight Barnabus Vim and his intrepid Padawan Bly, on a quest to find an ancient Force artifact. However, as is the nature of such stories, what they end up discovering on the remote planet of Angcord is far from what they expected.

Amid the ruins and relics of a world that has seen multiple powerful empires rise and fall, there is a strange and lore-shrouded artifact known as the Echo Stone. Very little is known about the origins of the Echo Stone, but it’s said to possess a power that is “unlike any other.” Whenever talk of “unknown power” and “unlike anything you have seen before” starts to creep into conversations about legendary artifacts, I immediately think, “This thing is cursed and will lead to ruin.” I mean, that is the case 95% of the time.

As expected, when Barnabus Vim and Bly arrive on Angcord, they realize that they are not the only ones seeking the Echo Stone. There are sinister forces at work who are going to stop at nothing to try and claim the artifact for themselves.

The payoff is pretty solid, and I like the one-shot story format for this one. I feel like if they tried to stretch out the story, they would need to add a bunch of other threads to it, and that would end up muddying the point of the story.

In some places, the art suffers. There is a Jedi library scene (Image Above) where what looks like rendered books on shelves in a kind of digital blue glow format has not been fit to the perspective of the shelves properly. It really threw me off when I was reading the book because I could not figure out what I was supposed to be looking at, and then when the art brain kicked in, I was like, “Oh! They did not align this right, and no one caught it in edits… or cared.”

The lightsaber fights are fun, the underwater scenes are exciting, and the writing is light. All in all, it’s a fun book for any Star Wars fan looking for a quick read without needing to go find a follow-up issue. This is the kind of book that could be great for a younger reader who may be into Star Wars but who does not want to try and tackle a long-running series quite yet.

Until next time, Space Bigfoots, Cosmic Wizards, and Laser Swords are always going to make me smile.