Star Wars: Darth Vader by Greg Pak vol. 5 — The Shadow’s Shadow

Vol. 4 ended with Sabe acknowledging a piece of information that should’ve signed her death warrant:  She knows that Darth Vader was once Anakin Skywalker.  That the Dark Lord doesn’t kill her outright is likely down to the fact that she’s got Padme’s face, and is offering him a chance to prove that her queen was right about there still being good in him.  Sabe tells Vader about a colony of former slaves liberated from Tatooiine that are now being oppressed by their local governor.  Vader agrees to investigate and not only do they find that the former handmaiden was telling the truth, but the governor is actually overseeing an ambitious project to collect and weaponize energy from the planet itself.  Which means that the Dark Lord now has personal and professional reasons to want this official dead.

After a volume where it felt like the title character was pushed into the background of his own series, Vader is back to being the star of the show.  He drives and causes most of the action here and Pak manages to throw enough convincing threats at the Dark Lord to give readers a legitimate reason to feel that he would be struggling under all of them.  We even get to see Vader show off his podracing skills again, which is a welcome kind of nostalgia compared to the writer’s ongoing obsession with “quoting from the text” of the films in this series.  It seems like he’s getting over it in the first couple issues, only to come back and give us a reprise of the worst scene from “Episode II.” Any time Pak wants to stop with this stuff would be fine with me.

At least he’s still doing right by Sabe.  While it seems obvious that the former handmaiden’s story is going to end badly, she has good reasons for doing what she does and she’s trying to do the right thing in the end.  She even thinks things are going well for her ultimate goal at the end of the volume… but we’ll see about that.  Also fun is Ochi of Bestoon’s continuing presence as he’s still trying to stay on Vader’s good side, and making a total hash of it in the process.  All of this makes vol. 5 one of the better volumes in the series, yet one where it still feels hard to say that I’m genuinely excited about where it’s going.  Which is something of a problem when you consider that this is now the longest-running “Darth Vader” series published by Marvel yet.