Star Wars: Darth Vader by Greg Pak vol. 4 — Crimson Reign

Vader made his opposition to the criminal organization known as Crimson Dawn clear in the previous volume.  Now he’s out to purge its influence from the Empire and restore order to it along the way.  He’s going to need some help in order to do this.  By “help” I mean expendable assets who are willing to risk their lives to draw the organization out into the open.  These take the form of hired assassins, people looking for vengeance against Crimson Dawn, and those who the Sith Lord already has under his thumb.  The last group includes one Ochi of Bestoon, the craven assassin who initially only appeared to join up with Vader because of the power he represents, only to have switched allegiances to Crimson Dawn at the end of vol. 3.  Then there’s Padme Amidala’s former handmaiden, Sabe, who is still on the hunt for the title character.  The difference now is that she’s a lot more curious about his motivations.

The stuff involving Ochi and Sabe are easily the most interesting parts of this volume.  While the former benefits from the darkly comic undertones of seeing a character struggle through a situation where he is clearly in over his head, the latter is of interest because of the long-term plotting it represents.  Everything else is… alright, I guess.  It’s mostly a lot of running around the galaxy seeing characters we’re not that interested in kill a lot of people we don’t care about.  Pak introduces a lot of new characters in this volume and they wind up distracting us from the ones that he was already busy developing.  Chief among them being Vader, who winds up feeling like he’s become a background character in his own title here.

Then we get to the art and it’s a similarly mixed bag.  Leonard Kirk and Guiu Villanova illustrate the opening issues, with regular artist Raffaele Ienco handling the last three.  They all deliver serviceable, competent work which doesn’t elevate the script one bit.  While Greg Pak does well in cutting back on his relentless citing of the original and prequel trilogies here, this is definitely not his best work on the series.  The hope with vol. 5 is that he’ll push all of these new characters into the background and get back to focusing on what makes Darth Vader tick in this era.