‘Star Wars’ #1 Looks To The Past To Launch A New Era – Review

Marvel’s current Star Wars line has flirted with stories set after Return of the Jedi before.

There was the Shattered Empire miniseries (whose connections to The Force Awakens were, perhaps, not as direct as advertised), and of course, the recently concluded Battle of Jakku maxiseries. Poe Dameron headlined a series set just before The Force Awakens, but it was always “big picture adjacent”, so to speak. And we’ve gotten comic book adaptations of stories from other mediums set in that time period, like The Mandalorian and the Sequel Trilogy itself.

But the latest Star Wars #1, the third such to kickoff an ongoing book since Marvel re-acquired the license in 2015, is the first to launch a series in the gap between trilogies specifically intended to feature the ongoing adventures of Luke, Han and Leia. Yet for as much as its breaking new ground, much of this issue is dedicated to setting up a new threat that has echoes of the last time Marvel told stories set after Return of the Jedi on a regular basis, all the way back in the 1980s. And while writer Alex Segura and artist Phil Noto craft a perfectly fine kickoff issue here, it is those callbacks that represent the most intriguing thing about it.

Star Wars #1 opens in a familiar way: X-wings, Luke Skywalker, an Imperial Star Destroyer, a dogfight. At first glance, this could be the opening of a series set after A New Hope. Yet it quickly becomes clear we’re in new territory, as Luke’s foes turn out to be pirates, not Imperials, and Luke chases one, accompanied by Rynn Zenat, his companion from the Battle of Jakku, to the surface of a nearby world. There, we get our first glance at the mysterious foe: a knife-wielding, pale skinned being with a shock of dark hair.

These first ten pages constitute the issue’s cold open, and the reveal takes us into the issue’s credits. While he goes unnamed, here and later when the issue returns its focus to Luke, the character resembles nothing in so much as Knife, a member of the extradimensional Nagai species who, along with the Tof, were the central antagonists of Jo Duffy and Cynthia Martin‘s last big (and officially non-canonical) story arc which closed out the original run of Marvel Star Wars comics. The creators have been understandably cryptic in the pre-release press, but there’s been some indication that Segura is looking to the past to seed plotlines for this book, and it sure seems like we’re heading into a canonical riff on the old Tof-Nagai War.

For an old school Star Wars buff like me, this is easily the most interesting thing about Star Wars #1, in part because the rest of it is a fairly by-the-numbers “setup the next big threat” story. With the main trio of characters scattered, Luke, Han and Leia each spend their pages doing their own thing, all of which ultimately builds to the conclusion that a new war is at the doorstep of the New Republic, one involving the worlds of the mysterious Fernil sector.

Noto — who previously illustrated the Poe Dameron series — is no stranger to Star Wars work, and he handles the assignment here with aplomb. He manages to evoke the likenesses of the main trio (his Leia is particularly nice, and he even turns in a Mon Mothma who resembles Genevieve O’Reilly‘s portrayal of the character on Andor) without resorting to the photorealism of, say, a Salvador Larocca. Plus, he can make the “people talking in a conference room” stuff as visually engaging as the “people shooting energy blasts out of their hands” stuff.

The decision to immediately isolate the core cast from each other is a curious one. It helps sell the idea of a mounting threat, by having aspects of it creep into all the plotlines across the issue. But after an entire volume in which Han was absent (due to being, you know, encased in carbonite) followed by a maxiseries that was plot-heavy and limited, by dint of all the established material it had to weave around, in how much interaction it could allow between the Big Three, it would be nice to see our heroes get a chance to catch their breath and reflect on where they’re at in life before plunging into the next threat du jour.

The tease of a potential riff on/reinterpretation of the Tof-Nagai War is appealing not just because of the “member berry” aspect of it, but because it offers an opportunity for this book to drop the characters into a conflict with someone OTHER than generic pirates and lingering Imperial remnants (which have largely been the foes encountered in other post-Jedi stories).

In doing so, it could also help, however indirectly, setup the rise of the First Order and the events of the Sequel Trilogy, offering up a reason for the New Republic to miss the mounting threat because they’re too busy dealing with a more immediate one. Even beyond the nostalgia of possible references to old Expanded Universe stories, that’s enough of reason for Star Wars #1 to succeed in one key element despite some of my reservations: it leaves me eager to find out what happens next.