Star Wars: Legacy of Vader vol. 1 — The Reign of Kylo Ren
After the Battle of Crait, Kylo Ren would appear to be a man who has it all. He’s defeated his former mentor, put the Resistance on the run, and is now the new Supreme Leader of the First Order. Yet he feels no satisfaction from any of these things. All he can feel is the weight of his past – of his grandfather’s legacy – bearing down on him. So he heads to Mustafar in order to cut it out at the source. What he finds there, however, is an old servant of Darth Vader who has knowledge of how the legendary Sith Lord lived and where his power came from. He sees in Ren someone who can either carry on the legacy of his former master, or die an early death in the process.
Charles Soule has written more “Star Wars” comics than anyone else at Marvel, and most of them have been pretty good. So when he decided to tell the story of Kylo Ren between “The Last Jedi” and “The Rise of Skywalker,” there wasn’t any reason for me to think that he’d deliver a bad comic. Yet it’s never clear what kind of tone he’s going for here: Are we getting a serious take about a troubled villain as he tries to find direction at this point in his life? Or are we the story of a petulant man-child who uses his power to kill or shame those who stand in his way as he tries to pretend he knows what he’s doing here?
Most of the time I think the writer is trying to deliver the former, but there are moments of levity, even irreverence, that make it feel like we’re getting the latter. Not helping things is the fact that each mini-arc here is focused around the character’s “Kill the past” mantra while retreading a lot of familiar “Star Wars” territory. That may have been intended to be a feature, but it feels like a bug here. Luke Ross and Stefano Raffaele do provide art that’s really quite detailed and expressive here even though it’s all in the service of a story that feels like it’ll only be of interest to the completists out there. That’s because Kylo Ren’s reign at this point feels detrimentally linked to that of those who have come before him.