Star Wars: Jedi Knights #3 - Marvel Comics

STAR WARS: JEDI KNIGHTS No. 3, July 2025

It’s probably fair to say that penning a twenty-page periodical which simply consists of endless splash pages featuring Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi battling “giant monsters” may well have looked good on paper. But in reality the idea arguably falls flat fairly quickly as there’s little room for the narrator to provide much detail as to why Senator Bail Organa has crash-landed “on a planet full of skyscraper-sized monsters”, or just how Count Dooku’s former apprentice is able to locate the politician’s CR70 Corvette on foot whilst in the middle of a truly ginormous jungle.

Instead, Marc Guggenheim rather disappointingly expects his audience to simply take him at his word that these events have somehow occurred, and move on with the American author’s next preposterous proposition that a massive 120 meter-long significantly damaged spaceship can still be flown off of a planet’s surface just because it has a powerful Jedi Master on board. Now admittedly, Ginn is clearly “a student of the living Force”. But if he could single-handedly raise an enormous spaceship up into the air using his abilities, many a bibliophile will surely be wondering why he doesn’t at least attempt to do something similar to the significantly smaller royal starship of Queen Padmé Amidala when it is stranded on Tatooine..?

Perhaps this comic’s biggest weakness though is that it has very little plot with which to keep its audience hooked. Poor Kenobi is flattened at its very start so spends the majority of the storyline unconscious, and all his teacher needs to do is lift Organa’s vessel back into the sky for the tale to end. That is it. Such a lack-lustre narrative arguably smacks of a writer trying to do something new with an edition of a long-running title, whose loyal fans will most likely return to buy the next instalment regardless of whether the experiment succeeded or not. However, this is only Issue Three of “Star Wars: Jedi Knights” and therefore needs to do a lot more to keep people picking it up off of the spinner racks.

Sadly even Madibek Musabekov’s artwork doesn’t manage to maintain the eye throughout this book, with the Central Asian illustrator’s repeated sketches of Planet WG4587’s lush plant-life and monstrous Kaijura frustratingly all rolling into one. Indeed, one of the earliest problems with this comic is its opening where its debatably not clear exactly which Jedi is using their light-sabre to slow down their descent by burying it deep within the flesh of a towering alien lifeform; “I was rendered unconscious upon making a somewhat violent landing on the planet’s surface…”

The regular cover art of "STAR WARS: JEDI KNIGHTS" #3 by Rahzzah