Star Wars #38 ("The Ashes of Jedha" Part 1)

In Star Wars #38, Kieron Gillen joins as main writer, replacing Jason Aaron who had written Star Wars up until this point. My personal opinion is that Aaron's run overall, has been hit and miss and he didn't seem to have a good grasp on the characters. Now that Gillen has joined the comic, I hope he can breathe in some fresh air, and I thought this was a good point to start writing this blog. I'm a  big fan of Kieron Gillen, his Darth Vader comics were very well done and really captured the character of Vader. I also very much enjoyed Uber, his alternate-reality, extremely gruesome World War 2 title. So I am very interested to see where Gillen is going to take the story, after Jason Aaron's run left us with many "one-off" arcs that did not particularly have any importance to the wider canon and didn't really offer much character development or insight for Han, Luke and Leia.

I thought "The Ashes of Jedha" started off with promise, I think the new canon offers a lot of interesting moments when the "main Rebellion" joins up with Saw Gerrera's extremist partisans. The partisans' more violent ways were illustrated excellently in Rebel Rising and Inferno Squad. It also creates nice conflict on Star Wars Rebels and I hope it will continue in the comic.

We get to see Jedha as a nasty, irradiated wasteland in the time after Rogue One. I really liked the view we get of the planet from its crystalline neighbor, NaJedha. A giant piece of the planet has been cracked off. This is the final effect of the low-powered Death Star superlaser. We meet Ubin Des and Chulco Gi, two partisans who are in the middle of a firefight on Jedha. Ubin is a native of Jedha and a former alliance soldier who leaves and joins the partisans after Jedha is attacked. Chulco is one of the red-robed, square-hooded "Disciple of the Whills", background characters we see in Rogue One. I am hoping that they may be fleshed out in this arc. They're rescued from the surface of Jedha by Luke, Leia, and Han who take them off planet to the crystal planet of NaJedha where Leia tries to recruit them to the Alliance. 

We learn that Jedha is being plundered for whatever Kyber crystals are left, and this effort is being headed by none other than mineral extraction master Queen Trios (from Darth Vader Vol. 3 "The Shu-Torun War"), along with the cybernetically enhanced Imperial, Commander Kanchar. The establishing panel for these two are a good example of why Salvador Larroca is not one of my favorite Star Wars artists. For the time being he is the main artist on this book. He uses these photo-realistic traced faces all the time. When he is actually hand drawing everything, I like him as an artist. More and more however he is using this method, and I think it makes the comic look cheap. There are panels throughout this series with Han, Leia and Luke, and the faces he uses are directly taken from the movies. You can pinpoint what scene in the films the faces are from. This completely takes me out of the story. Look at Queen Trios below - is that Jennifer Connelly? This is Star Wars- this should be one of Marvel's flagship titles (and these comics do sell very well), and they should have top level artistic talents on it. 

I enjoyed what we saw of Commander Kanchar. He's a time honored "eeeeevil" Imperial, mixed with something like a classic James Bond (something else I'm a big fan of) villain. I was surprised to see him use his powerful robotic arm to break officer's neck to demonstrate his resolve. At what rank in the Imperial Navy can you begin killing off your subordinates? I guess at least Commander. I ask myself why they are still searching for kyber crystals even after the Death Star has been destroyed. Are we going to learn about the origins of Death Star 2? That would be something that has yet to be revealed in the current canon.

We return to Jedha as Ubin and Chulco present Han, Luke and Leia as hooded "prisoners", to get inside with the rest of the partisans, revealed to be seemingly led by none other than Two-Tubes as the issue comes to a close. 

Salvador Larroca is probably going to stick around for a while, so at what point do you just accept that the art will be very lackluster and just focus on enjoying the story? I have been at that point with any comic that Larroca draws, its just a shame that there's not a better artist on this series. He drew the entire first run of Darth Vader, by Kieron Gillen, and it was very satisfying from start to finish as a story. Star Wars #38 feels the same - at least from this first part, it seems like this will be an interesting story, with the potential for some intriguing reveals.