Since I'm taking a look at Star Wars: Republic this week, I thought it would also be a good time to look in on Star Wars: Empire, the other monthly Star Wars comic from Dark Horse. While Republic has the benefit of being written by one of my favorite writers, John Ostrander, Star Wars: Empire has recently been handed off to former Crossgen and DC scribe Ron Marz, and I've never been a huge fan of most of his work. The same is generally true of his Star Wars: Empire stories, but "'General' Skywalker," the two-part tale reviewed here, is stronger than most of them, based on a neat "Star Wars of Two Worlds" type concept and executed well.
It's been a couple of months since this story was on the stands, so I'm going to be a little less spoiler worried than usual. The central idea of this tale is that Luke Skywalker and a band of rebels find themselves grounded on a distant unidentified planet, where they run into a surviving clone trooper from the Republic era. Marz gets some pretty decent mileage out of the clone trooper's reaction to the shifting political alliances between Republic and Empire, and indeed plays up the clone trooper as more than just a generation one stormtrooper, which would have been easy to do in a story with actual stormtroopers in it.
Instead, the clone trooper plays nicely into Luke's story arc as it stood at this point, as he goes from farm boy to becoming one of the new carriers of an old and proud tradition. Able (the clone trooper in question) represents a skill and nobility in battle that the stormtroopers and their masters lack, and his self-sacrificing actions to get the rebels off the planet make for a pretty good action moment in the second issue. Marz wisely avoids killing off Able in a heroic sacrifice, even though that's the more obvious ending for the story, and instead puts him into a role as an intelligence operative where he could be used for some very interesting future Star Wars: Empire stories.
Which is not to say that there aren't some missteps in this tale. Certainly the attempt to build up suspense around the clone trooper for a big reveal at the end of the first part of the story seems a bit misguided, as any Star Wars fan is going to twig to what's going on right away. Still, it's not like the story is over-extended in general, and the first issue of the story does effectively build the isolated, forgotten feeling of the planet which explains how an artifact of a previous war could remain undiscovered there. In addition, while Able is interesting, the other characters, including Luke and his commanding officer, are fairly dull and unremarkable, such that the story really needs to be carried by the big idea and by Able's engaging action scenes.
Those action scenes are carried off in fine fashion by Nicola Scott, who takes over halfway through Empire #26 from Rose & Thorn's Adriana Melo. Scott's artwork is unusually cartoony for this book, and the general tone of the book is maybe a little too light, a little bright and shiny, as a result, but Scott tells the story well, and there are a couple of imaginative action scenes centered around Able's "last stand" of sorts in Empire #27 that Scott does particularly well. 7/10
