Book Dragon is reading - Dark Empire by Tom Veitch, Cam Kennedy, Todd Klein, Jim Baikie, and Lois Buhalis

 

[these notes date to November 2014]
 

1. Dark Empire
 

Lines like this one:

“They're headin' straight for the Imperial City where the Emperor himself used to hang his hat – when he was alive!”

are pretty clunky, and it does not make much sense for a character to be saying this unless it will turn out the Emperor is not in fact as dead as believed.

Leia Organa, wife of Han Solo, already a mother of two, is above all things, a jedi warrior.

It would be nice if the rest of the story remembered this early statement. I do like Leia getting to call upon the force several times early on in this story to accomplish stuff like acting as gunner on the Millennium Falcon. Although, she did not get to deal with the scavengers' attack dog-things (neks) despite preparing to so I suppose we missed out there. Thanks Luke, ya big showoff.

A weird thing about this comic is the way it has solid blocks of colour schemes. A few pages through some red filter, and then yellow-green on later pages and so forth, as if any single page can only have a strictly limited palette. Ami assures me this is not typical for comics.

Very striking visual of Luke being sucked up into the force storm along with R2-D2 and all the junk from the planet's surface.

The planet they were on at the start of the story is not named so far as I can tell, except as “the imperial planet”. It is only identified as Coruscant in the introductory text prefacing Dark Empire; I was rather surprised by how much the appearance of Coruscant differs from what I had been accustomed to. Also shock that the New Republic managed to lose control of Coruscant and this does not seem to have been regarded as a big deal despite there being novels set prior to this in which they are comfortably ensconced on Coruscant as their seat of government. Suspect some of this is due to Zahn refusing to let Dark Empire be set before the Thrawn trilogy (by refusing to reference this story) and it consequently having to be moved later in the timeline, but doubt that could explain it all.