Star Wars: Knight Errant vol. 1 — Aflame

At last year’s Comic-Con I went and picked up the majority of the “Star Wars:  Knights of the Old Republic” collections and wound up enjoying them a good deal.  Enough to do a podcast on them, in fact.  “Knight Errant” is the new series from “KOTOR” writer John Jackson Miller and it takes place in a slightly more recent time — 1,000 years before “Episode IV.  The stakes are no less dire as the Sith are resurgent in this era and seizing as many star systems as they can while the Republic tries to cut its losses.  However, the Jedi aren’t about to stand by and let the innocent suffer, and it’s on one such rescue mission that Jedi Knight Kerra Holt loses her Master and finds herself stuck on a planet in the middle of a Sith blood feud.

While Miller will never win any awards for his dialogue, this first volume gets things off to a faster and more invigorating start than “KOTOR.”  The story itself is fairly predictable, but we get some good drama as Kerra struggles with trying to overcome her need for vengeance against the Sith versus trying to save the planet’s inhabitants.  It also helps that she has some good villains to play off of as one of the Sith brothers is the person who killed her family many years ago and the other… isn’t convinced she exists.  Lord Daiman practices the self-aggrandizing beliefs of the Sith to a solipsistic extreme — he’s convinced that he is the creator of the universe and everything around him might as well be a vision of the Force.  It’s an interesting kind of arrogance that makes watching him carry out his plans more interesting than you think it’d be.

Art duties are split by Federico Dallocchio and Ivan Rodriguez.  Though I prefer Dallocchio’s style, both are very well suited to the material and there’s enough stylistic consistency between the two artists that the switch between the two isn’t jarring.  Overall, I don’t think that this would be something I’d recommend to people who aren’t already “Star Wars” fans, but those of you who liked “KOTOR” or any of Dark Horse’s other titles would do well to pick this up.