Star Wars, Volume 1: Skywalker Strikes by Jason Aaron

This is the first volume of Star Wars comics published by Marvel in decades; when the franchise was rebooted last year, several ongoing series from Dark Horse were cancelled. Skywalker Strikes contains issues 1-6 of the flagship title and takes place soon after Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star. Everyone's favorite farm boy is on a mission with Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and droids R2-D2 and C3PO. Right away this makes things feel less isolated than the events of Heir to the Jedi. They have a plan to destroy an Imperial weapons factory. Little do they know that Darth Vader happens to be there to thwart them. Later, Han and Leia seek refuge on a planet protected by an electric storm, and Luke feels himself called back to his home planet of Tatooine.

The danger of telling a story in between established movies is that we know that any characters who appear later are never in any mortal danger. None of those named above have any chance of dying, but Jason Aaron still toys with that expectation, effectively changing the question to "how did he survive that?" The writer is able to create situations that feel essential to the larger story, and yet it seems a little contrived when certain characters who rarely or never interacted on screen together come face to face on the page. Darth Vader has a meeting with Jabba the Hutt, and enlists Boba Fett to find the rebel who destroyed his prized superweapon. When Luke arrives at Obi-Wan Kenobi's house he confronts and battles with Fett. Meanwhile, there is also the introduction of Han Solo's heretofore unknown wife, Sana, who tortures a few of Greedo's Rodian pals to find her way to her husband. It remains to be seen whether this new character will serve the story well or feel out of place.

I must say the art in these panels is pretty great. The characters all resemble the actors and costumes that we're used to, and the opening text crawl and scenes set in space are given their cinematic space. It will be interesting to see what kind of stories this creative team comes up with that fit between the movies, and whether they can maintain this level of quality on a monthly basis.