Star Wars: Tales from the Clone Wars Season 1 by Pablo Hidalgo et al.

Star Wars: Tales from the Clone Wars: Webcomic Collection, Season 1

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 2008-09
Acquired: November 2012
Read: November 2025

Script: Pablo Hidalgo

Art: Tom Hodges, Grant Gould, Katie Cook, Jeff Carlisle
Colors: Jeff Carlisle, Pablo Hidalgo

Letters: Grant Gould

During the first few seasons of The Clone Wars tv show, StarWars.com ran an official tie-in webcomic. The accompanying strips were collected in a limited edition trade paperback by Dark Horse, which I picked up not long after it came out. Back in the 2010s, I was still a devoted collector of Star Wars tie-in media. I didn't quite buy everything, but one of my areas of interest was the Clone Wars. Not because I was a fan of the show (in fact, I barely watched it), but because of the original 2002-05 Clone Wars multimedia project, where between Episodes II and III the war had been chronicled across comics and novels. Some of that enthusiasm still lingered. Me being me, though, it's taken a decade to get around to reading the actual book!

The book is very much not aimed at someone who didn't watch the show, to be honest. It's mostly made up of short strips, each 5-6 pages, operating as preludes to episodes of the show. Like, you'll get five pages of Anakin and Ahsoka getting ready for a fleet action—I imagine as a prelude to an episode about said fleet action. Or you'll get five pages of Ventress defeating the king of a planet and getting him to lowers its shields—I imagine as a prelude to an episode about our heroes taking back said planet. Or you'll get five pages about Anakin and Obi-Wan getting captured—I imagine as a prelude to an episode beginning with them captive.

So if you haven't watched the show... well there's not much of a point. Strong art might make the experience enjoyable, but I found the art pretty variable; it's very mid-2000s DeviantArt. Though Dark Horse did good work with this era in its digest comics, these artists struggle to render the show's style in 2D. Tom Hodges's work is the strongest; I was sorry that I found Katie Cook's work here so poor because I liked her My Little Pony comics a lot, but she really does poorly with people's faces.

The definition, I suppose, of a book that's for "completists only." Or maybe not even them; though Marvel has released some pretty comprehensive "Epic Collections" of the Dark Horse EU material, these strips were not included in them.