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| Comic trade paperback, 134 pages Published 2010 (contents: 2009-10) Acquired November 2012 Read January 2019 |
Script: Mick Harrison
Art: Douglas Wheatley
Colors: Dave McCaig, Chris Chuckry, Dan Jackson
Lettering: Michael Heisler
Lettering: Michael Heisler
With this volume of Dark Times, I hit the point where I fell behind as the series was coming out, so everything from here onwards is new to me. Blue Harvest shifts the focus away from the crew of the Uhumele and Darth Vader (who both appear for just a couple pages), back to ex-Jedi Dass Jennir, who we last saw in volume one. It's okay stuff, but predictable, reminding me a little bit of a western, a little bit of noir.
Jennir is asked by a woman to help clear her town of gangs; of course it's a set-up (though not one I entirely understood), but also of course he manages it anyway. It doesn't have the painful darkness that made some of the earlier volumes of Dark Times work. You don't feel that Jennir is being pushed to the limit of his morality as he has been in the past. Still, I enjoyed it; it has nice touches, like Jennir inheriting the droid of a man he killed, so the droid is always grumbling at him about it, and the local fisherman named simply "Fish" who loyally aids Jennir. I'm over halfway through Dark Times now, so hopefully the series ends on a high note.
However: is it called "Blue Harvest" just because Jennir meets two different groups of blue aliens? And what's the "harvest"? That's a pretty far reach for a reference.
About the title: the comic is based on either Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest or A Fistful of Dollars which itself might or might not be partially based on Hammett's book. Somebody really wanted to use that title and this is the result =)
ReplyDeleteOh, neat, thanks for that! I guess it never occurred to me that there was a reference in the "Blue Harvest" meme to begin with. Reading the plot synopsis on Wiki, I can see the resonance. It is kind of a noir/Western story.
DeleteSo this is a Dashiell Hammett novel transposed into the Star Wars universe, which means it riffs on the title of a Hammett novel at the same time as the fake title of a Star Wars movie. Okay, that makes me like the title more.