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| Review by Tony Pacitti |
A New Hope ends with an iconic happy ending.
The Death Star was destroyed and the Rebellion had solidified itself as a legitimate threat to the Galactic Empire. Adrenaline can only carry a rag-tag group of freedom fighters so far, and as the films credits rolled our heroes were left to cope with heavy losses in private.
Consider what the characters lost.
What we see as an uplifting end to a thrill-a-minute space fantasy is only a moment’s pause from the harsh reality that these characters’ lives are forever burdened by the costs of their freedom.
In the Shadow of Yavin, the first volume in a new series from Dark Horse set in the era immediately following of A New Hope puts these themes front and center.
Brian Wood’s script puts these personal struggles in the spotlight, forcing our heroes to deal with their survivor’s guilt head on and shows us the Rebellion in a desperate state of “Now what?”.
Destroying the Death Star was a blow, but it was also like taking a bat to a hornet’s nest. The Rebellion, in its superficial moment of triumph, is weaker than ever. The base on Yavin IV has been compromised and abandoned, leaving the Rebels adrift through space and searching desperately for a new home while the Empire hunts them with renewed purpose.
Luke, Leia, and stalwart second-banana Wedge Antilles are determined to find that special planet just out of the Empire’s line of sight, but are ambushed at every hyperspace jump leading Alliance brass to fear a spy is in their midst. With that fear in mind Leia is tasked with putting together a crack team of pilots to not just find the Alliance’s new home, but to also smoke out their Imperial spy.
Meanwhile deep in Imperial space Han is assigned to do what he does best, work the criminal underbelly at the behest of Mon Mothma. On the Imperial capitol world of Coruscant this all goes to hell and Han and Chewie find themselves on the wrong end of an Imperial double-cross and stranded in the lower levels of Coruscant with a couple of fan-favorite bounty hunters on their tails.
But the good guys aren’t the only ones with some heavy baggage to sort out after the events of A New Hope. We find Darth Vader demoted to babysitting the second Death Star being constructed over Endor and trying to wrap his head around that whole Luke Skywalker thing. Complicating things is Colonel Bircher, a ruthless pilot and quickly rising star in the Empire who has taken over Vader’s command ship and is assembling a TIE squadron to put Leia’s team to the test.
Unlike A New Hope this storyline doesn’t build towards a whiz-bang finale, but rather sets up the pieces for the conflict to follow.
Wood manages to write these iconic characters without any of their mythic sheen, capturing the tone of who they all were within this world before they became the legends we tend to see them revered as. He also manages to tip-toe around plot developments that are still years away for these characters, such as Vader’s struggling with what to make of the whole Skywalker problem, or the relationship tension between Luke and Leia. None of it is done in a hacky, wink-wink kind of way, but as naturally as if he didn’t know how either of those scenarios plays out.
Unfortunately the art by Carlos d’Anda strikes me as too “comic book-y”. It feels too contemporary in the same way that the prequels don’t feel like they belong with the world of the original trilogy. The women are all too perfect, the men all too square-jawed and all of them lose the personality that the actors brought to the roles. Even Vader and Threepio seem to have been somehow made more generically comic-ified. But as grievances go, it’s one I can live with. This is an exciting period in Star Wars lore, made more so by Wood’s confident direction.
