Star Wars: Han Solo & Chewbacca — The Crystal Run, Part One

If anything, I’m surprised it has taken this long for Marvel to do an ongoing series featuring Han Solo.  “Ongoing” may be a bit misleading as “Han Solo & Chewbacca” appears to have been retroactively labeled as a miniseries after finishing its ten-issue story.  It takes place not too long before the events of “Episode IV” with Solo and Chewie having just finished a successful job for Jabba the Hutt.  While they’re looking forward to some well-deserved R&R, the Hutt hits them with a proposition.  It involves stealing an urn with the ashes of a hated business rival for a cool million credits, and it comes with a couple of catches.  The first is that our protagonists are going to have to work with Greedo, who tipped Jabba off to the existence of the urn and its location.  The second is that the urn happens to be behind one of the most secure vaults in the galaxy.

This isn’t a bad setup for a story featuring these characters, and there’s an interesting twist regarding the man Solo meets at the end of the first issue.  Writer Marc Guggenheim also manages some tie-ins with the larger “Star Wars” mythos that come off as nice Easter Eggs if you’ve been as immersed in it as I’ve been over the years.  The problem is that the story comes off as one long series of complications designed to draw things out as long as possible.  It’s not that getting this urn turns out to be part of a larger plot; but rather, things just keep going wrong for Han and Chewie due to poor planning more than anything else.

I’d have less of a problem if this was all done with a modicum of style, but while Guggenheim manages to capture Solo’s breezy, cocksure nature, everything else about the story can be described as functional.  Particularly the aforementioned “twist” which feels so obvious that I just couldn’t buy into it at all – and that goes double for the “death” teased in the final issue.  David Messina’s art does have a bright, stylish appeal to it and helps to keep this first volume readable more than anything else.  Is that enough to get me to complete this miniseries by buying the second volume?  Probably not since I can just read the rest on Marvel Unlimited.

This volume also collects the “Life Day” one-shot that showcases eventful instances of the holiday for Han, Chewie, and friends in the present and past as well.  It’s a decent enough add-on to this volume due to its focus on the title characters.  I can’t say that its inclusion moves the needle in one direction or the other in terms of getting me to recommend this volume, however.