Star Wars #19 - Marvel Comics

STAR WARS No. 18, July 2016

Despite being the sixth best-selling title in May 2016, at least according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”, Issue Nineteen of “Star Wars” must still have had many of its 95,156 readers initially scratching their heads in puzzlement with its opening sequence involving Leia, Sana and Doctor Aphra facing off against Sunspot Prison’s fearless intruder beneath the underbelly of the Millennium Falcon. For whilst Leinil Francis Yu’s prodigiously pencilled tense confrontation is certainly packed with plenty of pulse-pounding gravitas, courtesy of Starros agreeing to kill Darth Vader’s misguided ally in cold-blood so as to ensure the safety of a helplessly unconscious Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, the actual circumstances of the smuggling pair’s capture isn’t even mentioned, and resultantly must have had some within this book’s audience nervously pursuing their collection of back issues in order to make certain that they hadn’t inadvertently missed an edition or two.

Indeed, considering that this twenty-page periodical’s opening word crawl ends with “Han and Luke… arriving in time for the unknown attacker to reveal himself” the fact that the publication subsequently begins showing the duo already impotently tied to one of the leg struts of the modified YT-1300 Corellian light freighter wearing grenade garlands is offputtingly jarring. Certainly the scene distractingly raises several questions concerning just how Obi Wan Kenobi’s protégé and the scruffy-looking pilot were so seemingly easily incapacitated at a time when Jason Aaron probably wanted his narrative’s bibliophiles to be solely concentrating upon Princess Organa’s emotional argument as to why Eneb Ray should spare her friends; “Don’t Hurt them. Look, I’ll put my blaster down. And then we can talk about…”

Unhappily, just as disappointing is the Alabama-born author’s revelation that the main antagonist behind his “Rebel Jail” script is simply a lesser-known character from this ongoing series’ first annual rather than perhaps one of George Lucas’ better known scum or villains. Admittedly, the former spy who successfully “infiltrated the Imperial bureaucracy on Coruscant” has the aptitude necessary to both overcome Sunspot Prison’s security systems and lead a team of droids to take the incarceration facility’s control room by force. But it still arguably seems shockingly wasteful to turn one of the Rebellion’s few figures who could apparently attempt to assassinate the Emperor Palpatine into little more than a deranged anti-hero simply for the sake of an unremarkable story-line…

The regular cover art of "STAR WARS" No. 19 by Leinil Yu & Sunny Gho