Star Wars: Mace Windu — Jedi of the Republic

It’s a credit to how Marvel has handled the “Star Wars” license that they have yet to release a genuinely bad comic book featuring it.  Some could be called boring and inessential, but this “Mace Windu” miniseries is notable for how it combines these two things. Don’t expect to learn anything about the title character here as he and three Jedi are assigned to investigate the Separatist presence on the remote planet of Hissrich.  Once there, it isn’t long before they find out that the Separatist operation is being overseen by greedy mercenary droid AD-W4 who’s looking to collect a few lightsabers for a bonus to his fee. He’s got all the droids he needs to make it happen; at least, he thinks he does.

That’s pretty much all there is to the main story.  Well, there’s also a subplot about how one of the Jedi Windu has brought along starts to freak out about their role in the Clone Wars after coming across a lot of dead natives.  That could’ve been an interesting storyline to pursue, but he’s quickly dealt with so everyone can get back to fighting droids only to be brought up again at the end to add what passes for moral ambiguity in this story.  Aside from that, the story and characterization suffer from terminal blandness. Every beat plays out in the way you’d expect with nothing being done to make the characters more interesting compared to how they’ve been portrayed elsewhere.

“Mace Windu” comes to us courtesy of writer Matt Owens.  I’m not familiar with him and while the end result is polished enough to not seem like a first attempt at writing comics, it’s not something that makes me want to actively check out more work from him in the future.  The above-mentioned blandness of the story also carries over to the art from Denys Cowan. Cowan has demonstrated a memorable scratchiness to his art in previous works, something which has been smoothed out into a more conventional look here.  As I said at the beginning, this isn’t a bad comic because it’s too competent to be called that. Yet it feels all the more annoying for its mediocrity and failure to do anything interesting with the title character.