A lot has happened in Star Wars comics lately. Like, a frankly insane amount of things, as Marvel has managed to pack the year between the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi with not just 50 issues of an ongoing main title, but wild stories across books like Darth Vader and standalone event series to make this singular year in canon one of the absolute wildest that we know of so far.
It’s fitting then, that as Marvel prepares to bid farewell to this volume and chart an intriguing future for its Star Wars comics, that it goes out with an issue that does much of what this series has always been: one that bridges so many different eras of Star Wars stories, asks big questions, and is absolutely not afraid to just get completely and utterly weird in all the right ways.
Star Wars #50, out today and written by High Republic scribe Charles Soule, with art from Madibek Musabekov and Rachelle Rosenberg, and lettering by Clayton Cowles, already jukes where you expect it to jive in its framing device. Although largely “set” in that aforementioned hectic year—as the events of Return of the Jedi come ever closer—the issue is framed with a flash-forward to the nebulous era between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, to Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy on Ossus. There, teaching what is close to becoming a final lesson for his most promising student, his own nephew Ben, Luke tries to impart a fateful piece of advice to Ben: the cost of doing good cannot be justified by doing great evil. To do so, he tells Ben a story, flashing back to the “present” of the comic’s pre-ROTJ setting, as Luke, Leia, Lando, and Chewie find themselves on an utterly absurd quest.
It’s one that, playing to much of Soule’s strengths in this era of Star Wars, effectively weaves together the franchise’s past, present, and future. Returning to the planet Gazian, home to a giant fungal “sea” that acts as a biological archive of every person to have ever visited it, Luke attempts to find lessons from the Jedi Order’s pasts to find an ultimate end to Emperor Palpatine. It’s a tension that sees him brush with darkness, when one of the memories within Gazian, the spirit of the dark renegade Jedi Azlin Rell, points Luke towards a mysterious ancient artifact that is essentially a box-shaped magical gun: put the blood of your target in it, let it do its mystical thing, and boom, they drop dead.
It’s an insane concept, and Soule, Musabekov, Rosenberg, and Cowles have a lot of fun getting around it, not just from its connections to his work in the realm of the High Republic material, but in how the adventure the gang goes on to acquire it similarly pulls on threads across Star Wars‘ hallmarks. There’s a disguised heist, there’s a trip to Naboo to see its reflection years after the prequels, there’s important acts of resistance that show that anyone can be a hero in the face of the greatest of evils. And even though we logically know that this adventure can’t end with the Rebel Alliance actually using this artifact—not successfully at least—there’s a fascinating bit of tension when our heroes surround it with the key to killing Palpatine and begin to weigh the grim calculus of whether or not they can actually go through it.
The device, it turns out, works by analyzing a target’s genetic material, and tracing a lineage through lives they’ve touched, connected in the Force—relatives, associates, people who feel a great influence from the target—all used as a web to eventually deliver the killshot to the intended victim… killing all those used in the webway in the process. It’s absolutely insane, and unlike anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before, but at the same time roots itself in ideas and arguments that have defined the franchise’s soul forever: who is guilty by association in Palpatine’s machinations for the galaxy? Who is worthy of redemption, and who isn’t? How many lives are worth spending to prevent the loss of even more under the continued Imperial regime? As the box begins to search for its path to killing Palpatine, we begin to see arguments form that we the audience know will now begin to play out in the next 30 years of Star Wars storytelling. We know the Rebels didn’t need this proverbial assassination box to kill Palpatine, Vader kills him at Endor. We know that he eventually returns, fostering a new wave of acolytes and admirals to bring about a new conflict that takes the lives of billions. Star Wars‘ cyclical conflict becomes, in the moment, a theoretical debate rather than known history. What would’ve changed if all this happened this way, instead of what we see in Return of the Jedi?
What’s interesting about all this is that Star Wars #50 doesn’t really conclude definitively, like it knows we know what is to come all of this. The events don’t really matter; it’s the lessons taken from them. Luke imparts his lesson to Ben, and that story peters off, ready for the inevitable tragedy we know is to come. The “present” is similarly nebulously cut off after Luke chooses to trick the device into finding another inert target, leaving this era of Star Wars comics both at its logical end and also wide open. Which, while not entirely satisfying in the moment, feels reflective of the very strange period at Marvel that Star Wars is about to enter.
The latest volume of the ongoing is not being immediately followed up by a direct successor, but a trio of miniseries that adapts and recontextualizes some of the earliest parts of the post-reboot canon’s ideas of what happened after Return of the Jedi. Beyond that, the publisher has stayed quiet about just where its Star Wars books will go next. The period after Return of the Jedi that would be the most logical next step; it is, arguably, just as fraught in continuity as the minefield that the past few years of comics have woven in the timeframe between Empire and Return, albeit for very different reasons. Brushing up against the events of The Mandalorian and its myriad spinoffs in that gap, especially while the era is still in flux as it’s fleshed out by live-action projects, would be a challenge the Star Wars comics have yet to really have to face, with the freedoms they’ve had filling out the gaps between the known quantities of the original trilogy. Going into the past and the prequels would avoid that minefield, but just simply provide the opportunities the book has already mined for the original trilogy to the prequels, albeit with more wiggle room given the broader timeframe.
Whatever’s next, though, will hopefully capture the scope and wild variety that this current era has encapsulated… perhaps, at the very least, on a much broader canvas.
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