Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith by Darko Macan, Ramon F. Bachs, and Raul Fernandez

Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith

Collection published: 2002
Contents originally published: 2001-02
Acquired and previously read: ???
Reread: January 2026

Script: Darko Macan
Pencils: Ramon F. Bachs
Inks: Raul Fernandez
Colors: Chris Blythe
Letters: Steve Dutro

The Star Wars series Knight Errant, which I worked my way through earlier this year, is set during the timespan of the "New Sith Wars," a millennium of on-and-off conflict that came to an end a thousand years before The Phantom Menace. Reading Knight Errant made me think of what (I believe) is the only other piece of narrative Star Wars content to be set during this period, the 2001-02 comics miniseries Jedi vs Sith from Dark Horse—which I remembered as being really quite good, so I decided to give it a quick reread.

The title of the book is pretty cheesy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the title came first, if some enterprising editor didn't come up with "Jedi vs Sith" as highly marketable and then cast about for an appropriate time period to set such a book in. Similarly, the book itself is one of those continuity fix-up stories Star Wars tie-ins love to do: the Phantom Menace novelization established that a millennium earlier, a guy named Darth Bane established the Sith when everyone thought they were dead, and an earlier videogame (Jedi Knight, I think?) established that there had been a big battle where a bunch of Jedi and Sith had died, and what if those were the same thing? (See also The Shadows of Mindor, which has a similar genesis.)

You can't take another Jedi's lightsaber, kid!
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #2

The end result of these two factors could be quite bad, I imagine, but rereading it confirmed my belief that it is surely the best miniseries Dark Horse ever published during its time with the Star Wars license. (As opposed to the best ongoing, which was surely Knights of the Old Republic.) It's a very different Star Wars, but successful nonetheless. There are two parallel stories here: ones about three kids with Force talent who end up essentially drafted by the Jedi for a last stand on the planet Ruusan; the other is about the Sith Lord Darth Bane returning to his fellow Sith after a failed assassination attempt and watching as they all fall, forming his own new ideas about how the Sith should operate as he does.

Lord Farfalla: great Jedi or greatest Jedi?
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #4

The story about the kids is great. It's very dark; it's about the horrors of war, and the difference between being an idealized "great warrior" and the realities of being an actual soldier. There's lots of tragedy and I had forgotten how harsh it was. (I don't exactly know when I read it before, but it's not on my reading log, which begins in September 2003.) Darko Macan does an excellent job with the kids, making them sympathetic even as they make bad choices, and the ending especially is terrific.

No, don't tell him Rain!
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #6

The Darth Bane plotline is more of a subplot, but Bane is great, a droll unstoppable killing machine, yet smarter than everyone around him. You can see how we would get from the many Sith of the Knight Errant period and this comic to Bane concluding there must only ever be two Sith. (Darth Bane would later star in a trilogy of novels picking up from the end of this comic, but they were quite terrible.) 

All Star Wars spaceships should be this awesome.
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #4

Ramon F. Bachs and Raul Fernandez do a great job on art. Some Star Wars comics set in time periods away from the films struggle to make the aesthetics distinct (this problem plagued Knight Errant, for example), but they give a mythological tone to the whole thing, with a Jedi lord who looks like a centaur and spaceships that look like sailing ships. I love Lord Farfalla; he's probably my favorite single-appearance Star Wars tie-in character. Bachs has a cartoony style that I feel like caused him to later be pigeonholed as a YA comics artist (the other work of his I've read is all from teen-focused comics: Legion of Super-Heroes, Monsters Unleashed!, Squirrel Girl & Ms. Marvel, Legends: Black Panther), but it's surprisingly good at evoking the horrors of war here. Overall, this is a great little package, underrated and undeservedly forgotten.

Black Panther Legends by Tochi Onyebuchi, Setor Fiadzigbey, Fran Galán, Enid Balám, Ramón F. Bachs, et al.

Legends: Black Panther

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2021-22
Read: October 2025

Writer: Tochi Onyebuchi

Pencilers: Setor Fiadzigbey, Fran Galán, Enid Balám & Ramón F. Bachs
Inkers: Setor Fiadzigbey, Fran Galán, Roberto Poggi, Oren Junior & Ramón F. Bachs

Color Artists: Paris Alleyne & Ian Herring

Letterer: Joe Sabino

Legends: Black Panther (this is clearly what the cover and title page call it, but everyone calls this book Black Panther Legends for some reason) was a four-issue miniseries telling key moments from the history of the Black Panther. We get the death of T'Challa's father at the hands of Klaw, T'Challa meeting Storm for the first time, T'Challa facing down his uncle to acquire the throne, and the first visit of the Fantastic Four to Wakanda.

To be honest, I don't really get the point of this. I think when you're retelling an origin story, you need to be able to add something new or different; this is aimed at a younger audience, judging by the art style, but is still supposed to be the mainstream Marvel Universe versions of the characters (according to the League of Comic Geeks website, anyway), not an alternate continuity (like the YA-aimed Marvel Action stories are). But in that case, we'd just gotten a new version of the Black Panther's origin just three years prior! And that version, I really liked; it effectively wove a bunch of disparate elements we'd seen over the years into a coherent whole.

This version just retells some stuff we've seen before in ways I found less effective and less interesting. In particular, I found this version of how T'Chaka died at the hands of Ulysses Klaw not as well done and emotional as the Rise of the Black Panther version, and this version of how T'Challa met and fell in love with Storm boringly simple compared to the version in Eric Jerome Dickey's Storm miniseries. And devoting a whole issue to T'Challa's battle against his uncle to regain the throne (a battle which is purely ceremonial and which his uncle wants him to win, though admittedly his uncle doesn't know it's T'Challa in disguise) seemed overly drawn out and pointless; when I got to the end of that issue, I was very surprised, because so little had happened surely twenty pages hadn't gone by! I also really did not like that it wasn't T'Challa who invited the Fantastic Four to Wakanda in this telling; I think it really undermines the character.

I guess it's a meet cute?
from Legends: Black Panther #2 (art by Setor Fiadzigbey & Fran Galán)

The one thing I did like here was the focus on T'Challa's adoptive brother, Hunter, who was a major character during Priest's run on the title. He's a character we haven't seen much of since, and it's nice to see him folded into the character's origins retroactively. (I don't remember much of Hunter in Rise.) Unfortunately, this thread kind of fizzles out because Hunter plays little role in the final issue.

I feel like the last few Black Panther stories I've read have totally failed to mention the "heart-shaped herbs" that were so central to the character early on. Does he have them here? If so, how does he gain access?
from Legends: Black Panther #3 (art by Fran Galán)

So, if you're looking for a modern, accessible origin for the Black Panther, I think you're much better off sticking to the only slightly older Rise of the Black Panther version. This one has little to add. 

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Jay Leisten, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Justin Jordan, Andrea Broccardo, et al.

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Monsters Unleashed!

Monsters Unleashed!: Monster Mash

Monsters Unleashed!: Learning Curve

Writers: Cullen Bunn, Justin Jordan

Artists: Steve McNiven, Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan & Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Andrea Broccardo, Francesco Gastón, Bachan, Alex Arizmendi, Alberto Alburquerque 

Color Artists: David Curiel, Michael Garland, Marcio Menyz, Chris Sotomayor

Letterer: Travis Lanham

 

Monsters Unleashed! was a five-issue miniseries that was then followed by a twelve-issue ongoing series, collected across three volumes. The main character is Kei Kawade, a young monster fan who during a worldwide invasion of monsters from outer space discovers he has the power to summon monsters by drawing them. He is eventually recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Damage Control and becomes known as "Kid Kaiju." He is mentored by monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone, and I read this as part of my working through her key Marvel Comics appearances.

 

Good thing some of the monsters are on our side!
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 2 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by Salvador Larroca)

 

The original miniseries and the first eight issues of the ongoing are all written by Cullen Bunn and feature eleven different artists. I really did not care for any of it. The opening miniseries is in particular tedious, with umpteen different superteams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, &c.) fighting monsters again and again and again. Too many characters, too many artists, no interesting character work or plotting. After that, the series just focuses on the ongoing adventures of Kid Kaiju and Elsa, but I still found little to latch onto or be interested in.

 

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Actually, that's not quite true. There's some okay stuff here—I particularly liked the appearance of the Mole Man, the original nemesis of the Fantastic Four, who kidnaps Kid Kaiju to get his help resurrecting his army of monsters. It's always a neat move to make an old, somewhat pathetic, villain into a figure of sympathy, and Cullen Bunn does it well here. But the big conspiracy of monsters, and the two different Fin Fang Fooms largely left me cold. Elsa is present, but contributes little, and seems pretty watered down from her characterization in Nextwave and Marvel Zombies (though I did like the bit where she becomes queen of some insect monsters). Some of the artists are pretty bad; Andrea Broccardo in particular can't seem to decide if Elsa is twelve or sixty-two years old.

One other big issue is that Kei summons five monsters into existence to be a team of his own... but while five big monsters might look okay (I don't think of the series's myriad artists ever had the knack of making me interested in monster fights), their lack of meaningful characterization (they are, after all, monsters) means you have a lot of characters that it's just not possible to actually be interested in.

 

Am I just biased in favor of fellow Mole-Men?
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by David Baldeón & Ramón Bachs)

 

Thus, I was really not looking forward to the last four issues. Whenever a series comes to an end and a new writer takes over for the last few issues, I think every comics fan knows that whatever you've been reading, it's about to get worse as a couple extra issues are cranked our regardless of quality in order to fill up a trade. In this particular case, I was dreading it even more because I knew writer Justin Jordan only from the execrable Team 7, and the book abandoned all attempt at artistic consistency, with four different artists on four issues.

 

It's my favorite food, too, Scraggs.
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #9 (script by Justin Jordan, art by Francesco Gastón)

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017-18
Read: February 2024

But... to my surprise... with those last four issues, suddenly the series became really good! Instead of attempts at big Marvel-spanning epics, Jordan gives us four done-in-one tales, each teaming Kid Kaiju up with one of his monster team, allowing us to finally get to know them as characters—not to mention him. Suddenly the book is fun and funny, exactly the kind of thing I would have liked all along. But four issues of it were well worth it (though perhaps not worth reading the previous thirteen). We get colonies of giant bees and Cthuloid menaces worshipped by loser cultists and Transformers expys on the loose in New York City. (One issue is about the Inhumans, but I guess you can't win them all.) I was suddenly able to tell all the monsters apart from one another, and I didn't even mind that Elsa—ostensibly my whole reason for being here—was written out after issue #10. Good stuff, and I wish Justin Jordan had written the series from its beginning.

This is the fifth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers The Death of Doctor Strange and Marvel Action: Chillers. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)
4. Marvel Zombies: Battleworld (2006-15)
   

Review: Marvel Rising by Devin Grayson, et al.

Marvel Rising is a five-part story that confusingly runs through one #0 issue and four #1s; it's hard for me to imagine someone outside the comic book faithful being able to figure this out. I mean, what's the different between Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl & Ms. Marvel #1 and Marvel Rising: Ms. Marvel & Squirrel Girl #1, and why do they contain parts 2 and 3 of an ongoing story, which also has a part 0? The story unites Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, America Chavez, and some guy called (for real) Dante Inferno who I never heard of; despite the covers, Captain Marvel, Falcon, Spider-Gwen, and whoever the girl wearing purple with purple hair is never put in appearances.

Since the closure of ComicsAlliance, I barely consume comic book news anymore, so I wouldn't have known this comic even existed if my local comic shop owner hadn't stuck Marvel Rising: Alpha #1 in my pull list on the basis that I read Ms. Marvel. He's always doing stuff like this, and I'm forever telling him that no, I don't want any Transformers comic that's not Lost Light, but this time I was happy to go for it, since Marvel Rising is partially co-written by G. Willow Wilson, writer of Ms. Marvel.

It's a fun enough story, and I'm glad I read it. The best parts are probably the first couple installments. In her civilian identity of Doreen Green, Squirrel Girl is volunteering at a coding camp for high schoolers, which Ms. Marvel is attending in her civilian identity of Kamala Khan. It turns out that one of the other classmates is a budding supervillain, with the ability to make things in computer games come to life.

Thus we get a lot of secret identity hijinks, as Kamala must fight back without her teachers figuring out she's Ms. Marvel, and Doreen must fight back without her students figuring out she's Squirrel Girl. Writer Devin Grayson is good at capturing the charming side of both characters, and it's especially well done when in part 2, Ryan North and G. Willow Wilson step in to write the segments featuring their own characters themselves. In part 3, there are lots of good jokes about videogames, and Kamala's enthusiasm for them. Also, North's comedic captions are super-fun, and you have to love the way having the powers of a squirrel is taken semi-seriously.

Additionally, I really like the artwork of Irene Strychalski, who draws the North-penned Squirrel Girl segments in parts 2 and 3; it has some nice cartoony energy to it, and I'd read an ongoing comic about any of these characters drawn by her. (Cover-wise, the covers by Gurihiru, who I primarily know from their work on Avatar: The Last Airbender are excellent, particularly the video-game themed ones, but my favorite of all the covers was the one by Elsa Charretier on part 3, which is the one I've emphasized at the top of this page. I wasn't previously familiar with her work, but it's clearly excellent. I'm less enamored with the variants by Rian Gonzalez, but thankfully I only ended up with his work on part 4.)

Unfortunately, the last couple parts don't quite deliver on the potential of the first couple. The characters spend much of the second half trapped in a videogame world; this concept has been done worse than this, but it's still somewhat flat. I did like that the story focused less on "if-you-die-in-the-game-you-die-in-real-life!" perils, and more on the attempts of the group to break the parameters of the game in order to escape, but the rules still came across as arbitrary. Also, in part 2, there's this whole subplot about how the villain can't create matter, just borrow it and change its characteristics, but by parts 3 and 4, this clearly is not the case, and none of the ideas referenced in part 2 ever come up again, so I'm not sure why they were included to begin with.

Being a miniseries outside of the characters' main series means that this can never have the impact that a "real" Ms. Marvel comic has, and it has less of her civilian life too, but it still captures what I like about her and by extension the rest of its cast of characters. This is a fun comic that's worth your time if you have an interest in any of the four central characters, just 1) don't be fooled by the characters on the covers, and 2) don't be confused by the bizarre numbering.

Marvel Rising was originally published in Marvel Rising #0, Marvel Rising: Alpha #1, Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl & Ms. Marvel #1, Marvel Rising: Ms. Marvel & Squirrel Girl #1, and Marvel Rising: Omega #1 (June-Nov. 2018). The story was written by Devin Grayson (parts 0-4), Ryan North (parts 2-3), and G. Willow Wilson (parts 2-3); illustrated by Marco Failla (part 0), Georges Duarte (parts 1 & 4), Irene Strychalski (parts 2-3), Ramón Bachs (parts 2-3), and Roberto Di Salvo (part 4); colored by Rachelle Rosenberg; lettered by Clayton Cowles; and edited by Heather Antos and Sarah Brunstad.

Return to the Threeboot: A Review of Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Manifest

Yours truly has a commentary up on the Torchwood 10th anniversary special over at USF this weekend. Every Torchwood character you loved, plus ones you didn't even remember!

Comic hardcover, 141 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09) 
Acquired and read September 2016

Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Manifest

​

Writer: Jim Shooter

Pencillers: Francis Manapul with Rick Leonardi and Ramon Bachs
Inkers: Livesay with Dan Green and Mark McKenna
Colorists: JD Smith
Letterer: Steve Wands

It's not like the Legion of Super-Heroes run of Jim Shooter, Francis Manapul, and Livesay is terrible or anything. It's a competently made superhero comic book. But it just doesn't hold a candle to what Mark Waid and Barry Kitson did before it. Waid and Kitson's run felt like it was bursting with ideas-- too many ideas, sometimes, because the title often felt like it wasn't giving all the ideas the focus they deserved. Shooter and company don't really capitalize on any of these ideas (the backstories ascribed to Sun Boy, Element Lad, Triplicate Girl, and Phantom Girl are never brought up), and many of them they outright contradict (Brainiac 5 says time travel isn't possible even though he arranged for Supergirl to travel to the past in The Quest For Cosmic Boy, and he gave her a message designed to save the life of his ancestor according to R.E.B.E.L.S.; the massive camp of Legion followers that defined the tone of the Waid/Kitson stories never turn up in this story, and then all of a sudden tons of superpowered underagers are auditioning for the United Planets Young Heroes, which doesn't really make any sense to me at all*). Shooter does at least remember that the Legion used to read 20th-century DC comics in this volume; Phantom Girl reads Princess Projectra an issue of Action Comics about the original Brainiac.

I wasn't always won over by the Legion's new uniforms either, especially given they were supposedly designed by some twelve-year-old kid. Apparently a twelve year old who loves cleavage and side panels.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #46 (art by Francis Manapul and Livesay & Mark McKenna)

As I read more superhero comics, my growing hypothesis is that you can get away with this kind of thing if what you do is the same level of interesting (or, even better, more interesting) than what you supplant, but Shooter and co. fail this test. This volume sees Princess Projectra suddenly become a villain, and then moves into weird freaky-deaky incomprehensible mind stuff as she battles Brainiac inside his own mind-- the plotline alternates between farfetched and banal. The big overarching story that's driven this whole run, about mysterious aliens being deposited from across the universe, who are then followed by a whole planet, never really has the hooks to be interesting. It's a bunch of faceless goons, which is one of the least interesting kind of comic book villains. There's also some relationship melodrama, but because these characters don't really feel like the Waid/Kitson characters, it's difficult for me to invest in who Saturn Girl should be in love with. (Plus, Saturn Girl is portrayed as a bit of a sad sack, not the strong version of her I loved in the classic days of the Legion or in Abnett and Lanning's Legion Lost.) And I don't really care for M'rissey, the Legion's "business manager" who solves all the main characters' problems for them.†

Shooter's version of Saturn Girl sort of rapidly alternates between unlikable hard-as-nails invasive telepath, and unlikable spineless sobber.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #46 (art by Francis Manapul and Livesay & Mark McKenna)

Francis Manapul is a decent artist, but still developing-- I like the later work I've seen from him on The Flash a lot more than this very anime style. And the way the script but especially the art insists on sexualizing these underage characters is a little uncomfortable. Like, there's nothing wrong with the Legionnaires being sexy, but here it mostly comes across as crude.

I know Invisible Kid was one of the younger Legionnaires, but I didn't think he was meant to be eight.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #50 (art by Ramon Bachs & Livesay)

Shooter's run was curtailed; the last issue here resolves many things far too easily (the massive threat of the past dozen issues is defeated with nine seconds of hacking from Brainiac) and leaves others entirely unaddressed (we never learn what happened to Cosmic Boy or the other Legionnaires who traveled through the time portals to the 41st century). If I had invested in the ongoing stories of this era, I'd be angry, but as it was, I was just kind of relieved. I am angry that the "threeboot" was dumped in favor of the "deboot," however, probably the most retrograde and harmful move in the long history of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and one that I would argue that leads directly to the fact that it's no longer published today, for the first time in five decades.

* Like, wouldn't people like this already be in the Legion? And surely they wouldn't want to work for the man!
† Actually, isn't a bit weird that Shooter introduces a slew of new Legionnaires here but ignores the new ones introduced by Waid and Kitson, like Dream Boy? I never really got the point of Gazelle.