Force Matters: Simple Colors For A Simple Man In ‘Boba Fett — Black, White & Red’ #1

Han, Luke and Valance face a blast from the past while Boba Fett goes tri-chromatic in the latest batch of Star Wars comics!

Star Wars #5 by Alex Segura & Phil Noto

Luke, Han and Valance battle of contingent of Battle droids on Loradil.

• Amongst the various Battle droids the heroes encounter are standard B1 droids, the B2 super battle droid, Droidekas aka Destroyer droids, T-series tactical droids and BX commando droids.

• The droid leader says they were en route to Agamar when their ship was brought down on Loradil; Agamar is where the droid general Kalani retreated after being forced off Onderon in the fifth season of The Clone Wars (and which has a surprisingly long history). Later, the Spectres encounter the remnants of that force on Agamar in the Rebels Season 3 episode “The Last Battle.” Like the droids in this issue, Kalani and his forces evaded the shutdown command issued to the Separatist droid armies at the end of the Clone Wars, though I don’t think the tactical droid here is meant to be Kalani (for one thing, by the end of “The Last Battle”, Kalani is well aware of the current state of the galaxy).
• It doesn’t play as well in digital, but Noto does one of those cool double page spreads with inset panels, showing Han, Luke and Valance fighting the droids in full and then zeroing in on specific actions in the insets.
• In a brief interlude, Leia and Mon Mothma remind us that Reyna Oskure is allied with the Fenril sector leaders and stoking the tensions between them and the New Republic.
• In the final pages, Noto once again cuts back and forth between two sets of actions (Luke holding off the droids while Han and Valance try to find a way out) not from page to page but panel to panel, a technique I always enjoy.

I’m a sucker for cross era action (where characters from different trilogies interact) like this, and Noto handles the action well. At the same time, it’s hard not feel like this issue — which is mostly just one long action sequence — is padding the story out a bit.

Star Wars: Boba Fett — Black, White & Red #1 by Benjamin Percy & Chris Allen

A prison break drops Boba Fett in the middle of the Rebel/Imperial conflict.

• This series is the latest entry in the “Black, White, Red” franchise; previously, Darth Vader and Darth Maul both received the treatment (as well as traditional Marvel characters like Wolverine, Deadpool and Venom, as well as 20th Century Studios’ Alien and Predator- the latter of which is currently running).
• Unlike some of those earlier versions, this is not an anthology series collecting multiple stories in each issue, but rather dedicates all its page to telling one story.
• While the original “and red” gimmick was meant to highlight the blood spilled by the violent title characters, red is deployed here for more than just blood, including in laser blasts, skin tones, and highlights of Boba Fett’s armor.

• The prison Boba Fett breaks his quarry out of, Sterna IV, is reminiscent of Narkina 5 from Andor.
• Boba is working for a gangster named Tusk, who is basically an anthropomorphic rhinoceros, a species I don’t recognize from any previous stories.
• On the Imperial side of things, Boba is facing off against Captain Coldwell, a female Imperial officer with a scarred, blood-red eye.
• And on the Rebel side, he meets the Saw Gerrera-esque Rooker, who appears to have a Lasat (the same species as Zeb from Rebels) on his crew. Hopefully some combination of this trio will recur throughout this book.
• The thief Fett is hired to retrieve by both the Empire and Rebellion, Jabar is a four-armed Besalisk, the same species as Obi-Wan’s favorite Coruscant diner owner, Dexter Jettster.

Percy does a good job of centering Boba Fett as the protagonist without making him a hero, while Allen’s style gives the issue a pleasantly-cartoony look, reminiscent of the some of the early 2000s Dark Horse stories. At the same time, some panels and pages alike are often exhaustively cramped, and occasionally the black/white/red gimmick evokes bad early 90s coloring effects more than anything.

Cover of the Week: Star Wars #5 (EM Gist Variant)

I love EM Gist’s cover. They remind me of old school pulp novels and Earl Norem’s Masters of the Universe artwork. Marvel very briefly had him doing the main covers on the previous volume of Star Wars; it’d be great to see more from him.