Why the New Star Wars Comic Is Not for Me
I love Star Wars. When I was a kid I saw the first minutes of Episode IV before my parents promptly sent me to bed. They were recording it for my brother and me so we could to watch it the following day, during our school-free Wednesday afternoon. But it was not enough. So I got out of bed, and walked my way back to the TV room to sit behind the door and listen. I thought I was being so clever and so discreet… It took approximately 20 seconds for my dad to show up at said door and send me back to bed with this terrifying threat: “Go back to bed or I stop recording the movie”.
I have not read many of the Dark Horse comics, but I have read Brian Wood’s Star Wars and enjoyed most of it. I was pretty excited by the first issue of the new comic. And Marvel had done its share to make me want to read it. To name only one thing: Jason Aaron is one of my favorite writers. And I wasn’t disappointed. I enjoyed reading it. I agreed with most of the excitement I saw online, including here at Panels where Dave Accampo made a very compelling case. Yet somehow when issue two came out, I did not jump on it.
When I pick up my comics I usually sit down with the week’s pile (which sometimes include more than one week worth of comics) and I loosely rank them in the order I want to read. I am not the kind to keep the best for the end. I am always afraid I will not have enough time to go through everything, so I start with what I really want to read. For example, I don’t think I have ever read anything but Saga first when it was part of the batch. And something strange happened with issue two of Star Wars. I put it in second position. But as I finished whatever I was reading first, I pushed it back one rank. I kept postponing reading it every time I was finished with what came before. It actually ended up on the bottom of the pile. I read it last.
And it took me time to actually figure out why I was not behaving like I truly enjoyed the comic. Because even after I was done with issue two, all the things I said I had liked in issue one were still there. I had visibly enjoyed issue one, why wasn’t I behaving as such? Why was I disappointed by issue two when it was more of the same stuff I had enjoyed? I have to credit some people who have helped me understand some of what was not working for me including iFanboy’s episode 471. And it comes down to this: it does not feel real to me. If Luke had to fight Vader at this stage of the story I would have known about it. The story the comic tells us is exciting because it seems important to the main story, but it is exactly the reason why I don’t think it couldn’t have happened. To borrow the metaphor from Dave’s post who described the first issue as feeling like someo
ne finding a lost recording of the original band, my brain does not want to accept these new tracks as genuine. If such a recording existed we would have known about it. Here, if such important things had happened in between the movies, they would have been part of the main story. They would have been included in the movies, not part of the ellipses. I think the reason I liked Brian Wood’s Star Wars is that it made sense that the kind of adventures Luke, Han, and Leia were having had happened off screen. I like these comics because I could believe they took place in between the movies without me knowing about them until now.
I do understand that these reasons why I do not think the comic is for me are probably contributing to make it a successful book. Why, when you pick up a comic called Star Wars, wouldn’t you want to find the all-star cast of the movies? Worse, I am probably going to keep reading it for at least a few more issues. I want to still be able to discuss what is going on. So please keep telling me why I am wrong. You might talk me into believing in the existence of this story. I want to!
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