Star Wars Vol 3:
Rebel Girl – Release October 1st
Review by Brian Novicki
Brian Wood’s Star Wars
is a series set shortly after Star Wars:
A New Hope. The thrust of the series is the Rebel Alliance searching for a
new base of operations after the successful destruction of the Death Star.
Volume 3, Rebel Girl, begins as
Princess Leia believes she has found this new home, on the planet Arrochar. The
catch is she has to marry the prince of Arrochar if the Rebels are to be
allowed to stay.
After reading the first volume of this series, In the Shadow of Yavin, I quickly
dropped this book. The characterizations of people like Leia and Luke felt off
and the pacing was extremely slow. In Rebel
Girl Wood is able to move the story along at a speed that makes it much
easier to read, but still misses the core of the characters. Luke spends the
entire story angry and jealous over Leia’s upcoming marriage, to the point of
getting his wrist slapped by Force ghost Ben Kenobi. Also, it’s just
uncomfortable to read knowing that it’s his sister he’s pining for. He doesn’t
know that at this point of course, but it’s an incredibly awkward storyline.
Adding insult to injury, Leia having to decide whether to
marry for duty at the price of her happiness is a story that the Expanded
Universe has already done in the novel The
Courtship of Princess Leia. It’s frustrating to see that story beat reused,
especially when it wasn’t done particularly well in the novel either.
Stéphane Créty’s art is at its best when he’s rendering
familiar ships like X-wings and Star Destroyers. There’s a scene of X-wing
flight training in a canyon that looks wonderful. Créty struggles to capture the likenesses of
characters from the films though. His Leia starts out looking like a generic
woman and slowly evolves to look more like Carrie Fisher over the course of the
book. The men are another story entirely. Everyone, whether a major character
like Han or a minor one like Wedge Antilles, looks about fifty years old, and
nothing like their actor. Now, I don’t expect comic adaptations to perfectly
match the faces of actors, but when the only way you can tell characters apart
from each other is by their hair color, that’s a problem. When many of your
characters spend a lot of their time wearing flight helmets, that can make the
story a bit hard to follow.
It’s hard to recommend Star
Wars: Rebel Girl. Its story is predictable and its
art is mediocre. Additionally, the upcoming Star
Wars series from Marvel written by Jason Aaron will be taking place in the
same time frame, post-A New Hope, and
will likely benefit from a closer relationship with Lucasfilm through the newly
formed Story Group. Unless you’re a Star Wars completionist, you’re better off
waiting for that series to start in January.
Brian Novicki is a dear friend of the site and a sometimes guest on our podcast. You can find his work regularly on EUCatina.net
No comments:
Post a Comment