Star Wars: Crimson Empire III — Empire Lost
In the “author profiles” section from “Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood” Dark Horse co-founder/publisher/occasional writer Mike Richardson was noted to be working on the script for the third installment of the series which he hoped would see print the following year. That was in November, 1999. In the intervening 12+ years, not only did I graduate college, start a career, have my comic collection expand over two rooms, but I also found time to stop reading “Star Wars” comics published by Dark Horse, and then buy even MORE after I started again. While I liked the second volume and its story that focused more on political machinations than members of the Emperor’s guardsmen duking it out, it’s hard to imagine anything being worth a wait this long. So by buying this, I’m really just crossing it off the list of things that I have to worry about before I die. I wonder if the people who were waiting for “Duke Nukem Forever” felt the same way. I should’ve learned from what they got with that debacle…
Kir Kanos is the last of the Emperor’s elite Royal Guardsmen and he still has a mad-on for the surviving members of the Skywalker family for their role in his master’s death. This makes him the perfect recruit of an officer of the Imperial Remnant named Devian who feels that the time has finally come to re-establish the Empire’s rule over the galaxy. Standing in their way are Mirith Sinn, the current head of security on Coruscant who has crossed paths with Kanos before, and just about every major character from the movies as well as the “Star Wars” expanded universe.
To be honest, I’m not even sure I’d have liked this that much if it had come out back at the turn of the millenium. Re-reading the first two volumes years ago, I was struck by how much they seemed like the work of enthusiastic fanboys, which I’m fairly certain Richardson and co-plotter/Dark Horse co-founder/VP of publishing Randy Stradley are, and that’s no different here. It’s why Luke and Leia get fairly prominent supporting roles, why Han turns up for a bit, Boba Fett shows up for an extended cameo, and we even see the likes of Nom Anor and Vima Da Boda too.
They threw in everyone and gave them some utterly terrible dialogue to speak. Expect lots of people announcing that they’ve wandered right into a trap before they die, a vow from Sinn to finally kill Kanos after she let him go during the previous two series, pointless suspicion from Luke, and lots more. Richardson and Stradley have done better work elsewhere, but there’s no real craft or style seen in what these characters are saying. All the words on the page are just bland, functional words that let us know that there is a story here and it continues to advance until the end.
The story itself isn’t that much better, though I honestly can’t believe that the writers had it in them to put in a scene where Luke narrowly escapes certain death, while Leia sees the explosion and solemnly states, “No one could’ve survived that blast.” Reading a scene like that, I almost have to applaud Richardson and Stradley for their commitment to such obvious tropes. Could it be that this whole series was just one big meta-joke on their part to see what they could get away with? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it doesn’t work if the writers are the co-founders of the company and one of them also edited the book. When that’s the case, it just looks like a colossal act of self-indulgence instead.
After all this, I almost feel bad about taking the art to task as well. To his credit, Paul Gulacy is hamstrung by two things: approximating the film likenesses of Luke, Leia and Han and the coloring from Michael Bartolo. Gulacy normally has a smooth, clean style not unlike Steve Dillon’s that lends itself to simple colors. That style is almost buried under Bartolo’s over-rendered computer coloring. There’s still a lot of awkward parts in the art that Gulacy should’ve been able to eliminate, given his years in the industry, but I can’t really hold it against him if he went, “To hell with this!” after reading what he was supposed to illustrate.
So “Crimson Empire III” is effectively a near-total wash and not worth picking up even if you’ve read the first two installments. Dark Horse did release a hardcover omnibus of the three volumes, but I’m not even sure if I can recommend that since they’ve also started releasing the generally very good (and mostly written by John Ostrander) “Clone Wars” series in omnibus format as well. Plus, the first volume of Ostrander’s “Agent of the Empire” series-of-mini-series comes out in the first couple weeks. What I’m trying to say here is that no, there really isn’t a reason for anyone to pick this up when there are much better “Star Wars” comics out there.