Kylo Ren Is A Sadboy In Another Strong Issue — Reviewing ‘Star Wars: Legacy of Vader’ #2

Thanks to the way it’s come to symbolize the divided reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren’s repeated assertion to “kill the past” is one of the character’s defining characteristics — certainly at the point in the character’s personal history in which Star Wars: Legacy of Vader is set.

Yet what Star Wars: Legacy of Vader #2 does — and what makes it a successful issue — is underscore just how much that sentiment is at odds with Kylo Ren’s other, even larger, characteristic: being a Darth Vader fanboy. Because Vader was all about his past, using it to fuel his rage and hatred and thus, his power. That tension — between what Kylo Ren thinks Vader was and what Vader actually was — is all over this issue, and it’s all the better for it. 

The first half of the issue is largely Vanee — the disembodied head-in-a-jar affixed to a robo-spider Cameron Hodge-style who served as an aide to Darth Vader — giving Kylo Ren a walking tour of Vader’s Tatooine haunts.

Writer Charles Soule uses this to underscore just how wrong Kylo Ren is about Vader. Kylo Ren assumes Tatooine is a stupid backwater planet his grandfather and uncle couldn’t wait to leave; Vanee points out Tatooine was actually the setting for a number of key events in Vader’s life. Upon learning that Watto is dead, Kylo Ren assumes Vader must have returned and executed his old master; Vanee assures him that by then, Vader had larger concerns. 

Artist Luke Ross gets in on this point/counterpoint action as well. Whereas the standout visual moment in issue #1 was a bravura action sequence involving Kylo Ren fighting his up a stairway across two pages laid out like a set of stairs, the artistic highlight of Legacy of Vader #2 is a quieter one. After learning his grandfather was born a slave and thus, his entire existence had been a crucible of pain and suffering. Ren is asked by Vanee if he can relate, saying he too must have walked a path of pain.

What follows is a two page spread of lil’ Ben Solo, hanging out at family dinners with all the Star Warriors, being taught by his cool uncles Luke and Lando, goofing around with the droids, learning to fly the Millennium Falcon (basically, a Star Wars fans dream existence). The contrast between that and Vader’s life at the same age — a life of toil and slavery in a desert wasteland — is heartbreaking, as is seeing just how much love and supportive family was in Kylo Ren’s life before he got twisted up and tried to destroy it all.

And then of course, after flashing back to that, Kylo Ren’s “er, uh, yeah, of course, my life was totally as sucky as my supercool grandpa’s!” response to Vanee is both pathetic and hilarious.    

From there, Legacy of Vader #2 devolves a bit into more standard comic book fare. With Watto dead but Kylo Ren still aching to extract some vengeance on his grandfather’s behalf, he sets out for the desert home of Gardulla the Hutt, who owned Anakin and his mother before Watto (she is the other Hutt alongside Jabba watching the podrace in Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace).

Even here, as Kylo Ren gets drawn into a conflict with Gardulla’s henchmen and it becomes clear that Vanee is operating with an agenda of his own, the tension between “badass Kylo Ren” and “Darth Vader Cosplayer Ben Solo” is palpable. The target of his great “carry out retribution in Vader’s name” attack is even further removed from the events of Anakin’s life Anakin moved beyond. She lives in a rundown old fortress that Ross depicts as the Hutt gangster equivalent of a fixer upper. And yet in the end, the overconfident Ren ultimately gets pwned by this second rate Jabba. 

It’s an entertaining conclusion to a captivating and, at times, legitimately sad issue. By tapping into the contrast at the heart of Kylo Ren — the evil Dark Side Warrior on the outside and the sad child of heroes desperately trying to emulate the worst elements of his family history on the inside — Soule & Ross not only turn in a great comic in Legacy of Vader #2, but illustrate additional depths to what is already one of the Sequel Trilogy’s most complex characters.