Star Wars: Obi-Wan — A Jedi’s Purpose

My guess is that we have the “Obi-Wan” limited series on Disney+ from last year to thank for this miniseries.  It’s hard to imagine Marvel pushing a miniseries featuring the character as he reminisces on his past adventures from his latter-day home on Tatooine for any other reason.  So we get stories of the time he snuck out of the temple on Coruscant as a child to help a friend, when he and Qui-Gon Jinn sought to help some miners when the light itself was working against them, and of battles during the Clone Wars when he learned the high price of seeking glory, and its terrible aftermath with his apprentice Anakin.

This miniseries comes to us from writer Christopher Cantwell and artists Ario Anindito, Luke Ross, Alessandro Miracolo, Madibek Musabekov and Adriana Melo who each illustrate a single issue.  Though the stories are all linked by Obi-Wan narrating things from the present (which looks to mean not too long before “Episode IV”), there’s not really a lot holding them all together.  While Cantwell tries to connect them all thematically in the final issue, while also spelling out the meaning of this volume’s subtitle, I wouldn’t say he’s all that successful.  Strictly speaking, “A Jedi’s Purpose” is less than the sum of its parts.

Those parts are still pretty entertaining as none of the stories themselves are bad at all.  Some of them, particularly the second issue’s scientific mystery and, to a lesser extent, the fourth’s riff on “Heart of Darkness” are quite good as they had me wondering where they were going to go.  These issues also had the best art, coming form Ross and Musabekov, respectively, though all of these issues look pretty great on their own terms.  It’s enough to make me want to see more from Cantwell and company in the “Star Wars” universe, but I think I’m just going to have to settle for seeing what the writer continues to do with his creator-owned work, as well as his ongoing superhero-related efforts from Marvel and DC.