When Big Moments Are Too Big: Reviewing ‘Darth Vader’ #47

What a maddening series this can be. For multiple arcs now, it starts off strong before petering out. Plot threads seem to be abandoned, in favor of the hot new ones, which are in turn abandoned for the next, leaving a pile of dangling threads and characters in their wake. At times, the art can be compelling and exciting. Other times, it is muddled and confusing.

True to form, The Razing of Exegol began strongly last issue, seeming to pull some of those lingering threads together and once again centering the Vader/Palpatine conflict in the plot. Yet while Darth Vader #47 isn’t a terrible issue, it swings much closer to “mess,” seemingly accelerating the established pattern.

It picks up where the last issue left off, with the Schism Imperial in control of the Sith Cultists’ Kyber reserves, but being threatened by the Cthulhu-esque Summa-Verminoth. If you expected this issue to feature a massive, page-busting fight between Vader and the psychic tentacle monster as a result, well, that happens. But it happens in a much more low-key and less visually-exciting way than the setup implied, with lots of talking and other stuff happening around it.

Artist Raffele Ienco does give us a couple of fist-pumping images in the course of the issue. It’s hard not to smile at the sheer comic book-ness of Darth Vader riding into battle against a giant monster on the hood of an Imperial shuttle. 

But Ienco’s strengths lie in those kinds of larger-than-life static images. Where he tends to struggle is in the more kinetic action storytelling. That’s the case again here. Vader flies into battle wielding his Kyberite Zaley shield and electrostaff (with a chunk of Kyber wedged into it) from the Force Unbound story arc, but it’s not entirely clear what happens next in the issue. He…blasts the Summa-Verminoth with…energy (presumably from the electrostaff, goosed by the Kyber) and does…stuff with the shield.

There’s tentacles flying around. His allies seem excited and his enemies despairing. But it’s all a bit cluttered and hard to follow. The disparity in scale doesn’t help; even atop the shuttle, Vader is dwarfed by the Summa-Verminoth. So regardless of which perspective the action is rendered from, the other side of the fight gets lost. The end result, despite the physical scale of the confrontation, feels small and ephemeral.

More engaging is the direct introduction of the Emperor into the plot. Even moreso than in previous volumes, this iteration of Darth Vader has been defined by a hero/villain dynamic between Vader and Palpatine. Early in the series, Vader attacked Palpatine directly, only to be ultimately cowed by him. Since then, he’s either overtly or subtly recruited allies to his fight, from Crimson Dawn to Sabé to the Schism Imperial. In Darth Vader #47, the Emperor, speaking through the Force/a giant Kyber crystal, makes it clear he’s well aware both of Vader’s actions and his motivations, namely, Luke Skywalker.

Palpatine, per usual, is rendered as the omniscient and almost camp villain, cackling with delight at Vader’s presumptions and actions he thinks are covert but aren’t. It introduces a new kind of tension into the story beyond just “will the Emperor find out Vader is moving against him?” It also syncs up nicely with the Vader/Emperor dynamic on display in Return of the Jedi, when the Emperor is basically telling Luke “whether you kill your dad or he kills you, I win” and Vader just stands there all, “cool boss” til the very end. 

The injection of the Emperor into the narrative also segues into the introduction of Luke into the story more directly. It’s honestly a little weird to see Luke in these pages (outside a chapter of a crossover event), but it serves to move him into place for a meeting with Sabé (aka his mom’s body double), thereby continuing the other plot thread introduced in the previous issue, which is a good thing.

So Darth Vader #47 is kind of all over the place in terms of good and bad. Its big moment is undone by stiff art and a difficult-to-bridge discrepancy in scale. Yet it also makes positive strides in the furtherance of its ongoing plotlines, focusing the ongoing antagonism between Vader and the Emperor and setting up Luke for an active role in the series for really the first time. Again, this whiplash between good and bad, between pulling narrative threads together and spinning out new ones, continues to make the series a maddening one.