I’ve been out of the Star Wars comic book game since I closed my comic book store five years ago, and now that I’m the Star Wars Examiner, I’ve taken it upon myself to come back into the fold in order to keep you updated on as much of the Star Wars Universe as possible.

The first graphic novel I picked up was from the Knights of the Old Republic series, it was volume 4 and called Daze of Hate, Knights of Suffering.

It should be noted that this book happens about 4,000 years before the life of Anakin Skywalker.

The first story in the book involved an evil corporate over-lord named Lord Adasca and how he’s holding both sides in the Mandalorian war hostage with the threat of space slugs he’s attached hyperdrives to and developed hormones of some type that will basically make them eat whatever system they’re sent to.  So a representative from the Mandalorian’s and a representative of the Jedi and a representative of the Republic are brought into Adasca’s presence and his plan is to sell his services to the highest bidder.

This felt like part three of a three part story and since I jumped in at the end, I felt quite lost through this portion of the story.  It seemed generally well-written and the art was really fun to look at, but I was just wading in a story I knew nothing about.  I was fortunate enough to know that a Mandalorian was a precursor to Jango Fett.  And I knew that Jedi had lightsabers.  And so I was okay with who was on what team.

Everything turned out fine and the space slugs, predictably, weren’t unleashed around the galaxy.

The next part of the story, though, was actually quite cool.  Part of that was because I was able to infer things about the characters, particularly a former Padawan named Zayne Carrick who’s been accused of murdering a number of other Padawans.  He was a minor character in the first half of the graphic novel, but became the main character in the second half and the story was actually really, really gripping.  It was also really fascinating to see the Jedi Order in it’s infancy.  This second part also had much better art (better? I don’t know, certainly more to my taste).

I would actually recomend this book to casual Star Wars readers, but I would advise reading the first three volumes first.  I know this volume made me interested in reading the first three and, if I can get my hands on them, I’ll certainly read them voraciously.