We’ve been raving for ages about director Arvin Bautista’s spectacular X-Men fan films: the Dazzler music video that first made the rounds back in 2014; and the follow-up, featuring Lila Cheney, which dropped last week. This weekend, we finally got sat down with Bautista himself to talk about adaptation anxiety, straddling the fan/pro divide, and what it took to bring Alison Blaire and Lila Cheney to life.
I wanted to resume blogging, and also wanted to re-read some of the many comic books I’ve purchased over the years. After re-reading a couple of my Star Wars omnibuses (namely my Tales of the Jedi books, which I’ve read numerous times), I thought it might be fun to re-read my entire collection of Star Wars comics and write about them here on Tumblr. Join me, won’t you?
I wanted to do this re-read and review in a rough chronological order. There are a lot of crossover points, but I’m going to keep things together thematically rather than in a strict timeline. I will be reading the comics of the Legends timeline (that is to say, Expanded Universe material released prior to January 2015, which is internally consistent but is being ignored by new movies and stories). This is partially for consistency, partially to facilitate the review (hard to do extensive chronological reviews when things keep coming out), and also to send a message that despite no longer being “canon”, this books remain good. For timekeeping, I will use the Expanded Universe notation of BBY (Before Battle of Yavin/Episode IV) and ABY (After Battle of Yavin). I may occasionally touch on relevant novels, video games, or other related media. I will not cover things I don’t own, but at one time I was a completionist, so the things I don’t own in some manner are few and far between.
Today’s first review is for the earliest story possible: the series Dawn of the Jedi. It’s lore goes back farther than 36,000 BBY, and the main story starts in 25,793 BBY and lasts about a year. It was written by John Ostrander and drawn by Jan Duursema. The series was composed of three five-issue arcs (Force Storm, Prisoner of Bogan, and Force War), and also had a 0-issue that served as a handbook. I read it as sixteen individual issues.
I loved the premise of this story. Going that far back let’s the creative team think outside the box and deliver something interesting. Despite that freedom, they still make great use of what little we do know about this time period.
The story is engaging. It risked being bogged down in world-building, but as the 0-issue handbook explained much of the history, we were able to go full throttle into the story. The characters were interesting and complex, and very well designed. I wanted to continue reading about them. Seeing Rakatan culture, as well as the ancient Je’daii (who were different from later Jedi, as they were not of the Light, but balanced between Light and Dark) was really great.
One problem I have is that it ended too soon. At this time in publishing history, Dark Horse Comics did not publish ongoing Star Wars series. Instead, it published five-issue miniseries one after the other (so the final issue was not Dawn of the Jedi 15, but Dawn of the Jedi: Force War 5). I never liked this method. For one, it omits the possibility of one-issue stories, which are often the best comics. Second, it sometimes confuses casual buyers (more people buy a book if it’s a first issue, but they won’t buy issue 2 if they missed a full arc and don’t know what’s going on). With this and a few other series, they cancelled the title when sales were too low, leaving a lot of story left unresolved. There were enough plot threads left to make one final arc (the end of the Force War arc resolved the story of the Rakata and their desire to conquer the Je’daii world of Tython, but the final conflict between Light and Dark, which results in the Jedi being devoted to the Light Side of the Force, remains untold).
In the end, it was a great premise, and the stories told therein were great, but the title’s early cancellation left me wanting more.
