Star Wars vol. 13: Rogues & Rebels

It’s the end of an era.  This is the final volume of “Star Wars”… in the post-”A New Hope” era.  The next series will transition to the post-”Empire Strikes Back” period as Charles Soule and Jesus Saiz take over from the time-marking team of Greg Pak and Phil Noto.  As I mentioned last time, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the three separate-yet-related stories they were telling.  Each had their own twist as Han and Leia wound up running into Leia’s ex, Luke fell in with a conwoman who claimed to know something about the Force, and C-3P0 and Chewbacca found that their supposedly uninhabited planet was home to a race of sentient rock people.  As a further twist on that last thread, none other than Darth Vader shows up on that planet looking to secure an alliance with said rock people.

While the charms of Pak and Noto’s storytelling are still present in these concluding issues, their attempt at going big for the storyline’s finish isn’t wholly satisfying.  Though the way in which all of these storylines come together feels organic enough, the actual climax is kind of a mess. There’s an awkwardly heroic charge against Vader, the Sith Lord tries to reverse the effects of an EMP, we find out that the planet has an… er, crunchy center to it.  Pak and Noto clearly had ambitions with their finale, but they wound up in “reach exceeds grasp” territory instead. It even lacks the simple dumb pleasure of the full-page shot of Chewbacca hitting Vader over the head with a big rock from earlier in the volume.

This isn’t the actual end of the volume, however.  Vol. 13 also includes the “Empire Ascendant” one-shot that offers three glimpses of the next “Star Wars” era and one epilogue.  They’re all generally fine as Soule and Luke Ross give us some Dameron family fanservice, Pak and Roland Boschi show us what Vader looks for in a droid striketeam, and Ethan Sacks and Paolo Villanelli do their best to make Beilert Valance seem like less of a try-hard.  That Sacks and Villanelli manage to make that happen is certainly an achievement in itself.  Still, the best of these one-shots is Simon Spurrier and Caspar Wijngaard’s epilogue to “Doctor Aphra,” though I’ll certainly confess to being a little biased in that regard.