Ania Solo and her friends run into an Imperial Knight – but is he an ally or an enemy? This week’s Star Wars: Legacy #3 is full of monsters and revelations.
With the help of the assassin droid AG-37, Ania Solo and Sauk have just escaped from the forces of Imperial Knight Yalta Val, but they’re still in hot water in Issue #3 of Star Wars: Legacy (DarkHorse.com profile for Legacy, Volume 2, #3). Meanwhile Imperial Knight Jao Assam arrives in-system and runs into his own trouble. Let’s dive in to this latest installment from the team of Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman. Spoilers ahead!
Summary: Unable to communicate with his old mentor, Jao Assam has arrived at the Surd Nebula, and runs into a blockade. Detained despite his credentials as a Knight, Assam blasts to freedom in his fighter. Meanwhile, AG-37, Ania Solo and Sauk have also found a fleet, and are on the run from its fighters. Sauk directs their freighter to take refuge in an unstable cave in the ring of Carreras Minor, and Ania jettisons her tiny flyer from the hold to take out their pursuers. Lying low on Carreras Minor, Sauk repairs the comm droid whose discovery started this whole adventure, but AG’s ship comes under attack of a giant tentacled monster. Ania and AG-37 go topside to shoot it away, but are rescued by Jao Assam and his lightsaber. With the monster behind them, Ania pulls a gun on the Imperial Knight, who reveals that he tracked down Yalta Val’s droid. With AG calming Ania down and Sauk revealing the holorecord of Val in a duel, Assam recognizes that Val is the other man in the duel, and that the one Ania knows as Val is an imposter – who is now in charge of the system’s communications array. Teaming up, the four follow the coordinates in the droid, which leads them into the nebula – only to find that the planet they seek is missing – but there’s a large ship waiting for them.
Meanwhile, the impostor has expedited the activation of the comm array over the objections of its crew, and untested, its power core fails, setting back the project.
Review: Ania, Sauk, and AG form a great team, and adding Jao to the mix should be interesting. Bechko and Hardman have made some great characters who work off of each other well, and give us some great dialogue (like the scene above). All three are sharp and quick-thinking and contribute to the storyline yet are separate characters. Ania’s quick to pull a gun on Jao, while AG concludes that cooler heads will get the answers they need, and Sauk shows his mettle by trying to back Ania up with a blaster (though he’s totally unfamiliar with it). Jao works off his gut feeling and good-guy training too – willing to fight (but not kill) his way out when he realizes that some thing is not right with this blockade, and yet jumps in to save Ania from the sarlacc-kraken-thingy instead of using it to his advantage.
Lots of great dialogue (and I love the use of AG’s accent, as lettered by Michael Heisler). There’s also plenty of spaceship action throughout – a chase through the caves in the rings of Carreras Minor, Jao’s escape, etc, with a good mix of focus on the ships and on the characters. Gabriel Hardman continues the use of a dark, spattery style that gives a gritty messy feel to space, and the use of shadows and Rachelle Rosenberg’s colors with their washes help highlight the scenes, yet keep the mood grim. It’s not my favorite style, but it works well for the mood being set: in a used universe, some parts are just grimier than others, like this junkyard girl from a backwater world which is now cut off and under the control of a villain.
Thumbs up! Last issue introduced the awesome AG droid to the mix, and now we have Jao Assam, Imperial Knight, in the party – and no break from the danger.