New Republic Week: Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy by Mike Baron with Timothy Zahn

Comic hardcover, 436 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 1995-99)
Acquired December 2010
Read July 2012

Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy

Scripts: Mike Baron

Pencils and Inks: Olivier Vatine, Fred Blanchard, Terry Dodson, Kevin Nowlan, Edvin Biukovic, and Eric Shanower
Art Assists: Vincent Rueda

Colors: Isabelle Rabarot, Pamela Rambo, and Dan Brown
Lettering: Ellie DeVille
Adapted from the novels by Timothy Zahn

Though I've read the novels many times, this was my first time reading the comics adaptation of Timothy Zahn's trilogy of Star Wars novels, Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command, making this a different sort of climax to my time of rereading New Republic-era Star Wars novels.

Unfortunately, although it was rarely bad, mostly this book served to remind me of a much superior work. Zahn's Thrawn novels are distinguished by their large, complex political plots; abbreviated into comics, each story is nothing but a series of haphazard and rapid scenes. Characters go places and do things for reasons the reader doesn't quite know, referring to things the reader hasn't seen. Though Baron gets better with this as the adaptations go on, they never become involving or deep.

The art itself is nice. Olivier Vatine and Fred Blanchard have a very distinctive style-- I love their narrow-eyed Thrawn-- and I certainly enjoy the work of Terry Dodson and Eric Shanower. (And since I complain about it so much elsewhere, never once did I feel here that a female character had been gratuitously sexualized, not even Mara to my surprise.) While it's nice to get visualizations of some of the story elements, this comic fails to add much of a new level of meaning to the original. Mostly, I just want to read the original now.

Dark X-Men: The Beginning

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2009)
Acquired January 2011
Read May 2012

Utopia: Avengers/X-Men

Writers: Matt Fraction, Craig Kyle & Chris Yost, Mike Carey, Kieron Gillen, Paul Cornell, James Asmus, Shane McCarthy, Marc Bernardin & Adam Freeman, Rob Williams, Jason Aaron, and Simon Spurrier

Pencilers: Marc Silvestri, Terry Dodson, Luke Ross, Bing Cansino, Dustin Weaver, Leonard Kirk, Jesse Delperdang, and Paco Diaz (with Michael Broussard, Eric Basaloua, Tyler Kirkham and Sheldon Mitchell)

Inkers: Joe Weems, Rachel Dodson, Rick Magyar, Mark Pennington, Luke Ross, Roland Paris, Edgar Tadeo, Jay Leisten, Leonard Kirk, Andy Lanning, and Guillermo Ortega (with Marco Galli, Eric Basaloua, Rick Basaloua, Jason Gorder, Sal Aegla, Jon Sibal, Ryan Winn, and Jesse Delperdang)
Other Artists: Mike Deodata, Daniel Acuna, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Ibraim Roberson, Michel Lacombe, Jock, and Paul Davidson
Colorists: Frank D'Armata, Justin Ponsor, Rain Beredo, Dean White, Christina Strain, Edgar Delgado, Brian Reber, Matt Milla, John Rauch, and Dave Stewart
Letterers: Chris Eliopoulous, Joe Caramagna & Cory Petit, Rob Steen, and Dave Sharpe

Holy cow! Not counting cover artists or editorial staff, 64 different people worked on this 368-page book.  Even if you discount everything but the core story "Utopia," which has just one writer (Matt Fraction), there are still some nineteen artists at work on six issues.  Oh, the American corporate comic book factory: how delightful.

Suffice it to say that I'd never ordinarily buy such a book (X-Men comics alienate me in general, and their gigantic crossover events even moreso), except that Paul Cornell has a few stories in it: three shorts that were part of a miniseries called Dark X-Men: The Beginning. Originally these were going to be published as their own book, but that ended up not happening and so I had to by this whole fershlugginer crossover just to get 20-something pages of Paul Cornell goodness. I hope you're happy Marvel!  These stories see Cornell reunited with his Captain Britain and MI13 collaborator Leonard Kirk to tell the tales of superheroes recruited for Norman "Green Goblin" Osborn's government-sponsored X-Men team.

"Namor/Norman" is probably the best of the three, as Osborn attempts to figure why Namor, Prince of Atlantis, could possibly care about what's going on in the surface world. Given its placement in the book after the reader has learned the answer, it's a delightful example of two men out-out-thinking one another.  I also enjoyed "Hidden Depth," where Emma Frost probes Namor's mind herself.  The weakest was clearly "The Temptation of Cloak and Dagger," which didn't say anything that wasn't revealed in the earlier chapters of Utopia.

Utopia as whole is about X-Men leader Cyclops's attempt to keep the X-Men based in San Francisco in the face of growing anti-mutant hysteria and attacks by something called "Bio-Sentinels" whose origins are never explained, not to mention the arrival of Norman Osborn and his government-sponsored Avenger and X-Men teams. The first chapter is actually quite good, building a feeling of tension and unsettledness as the streets of San Francisco are filled with angry rioters, and no one's quite sure what to do. Reading it for the first time after "Occupy Wall Street," it actually feels very prescient.  After that, though, the story stretches out too long through its last five chapters. The characters do interesting things, but we're not privy to their interiority enough to really experience them; Emma Frost must be really conflicted over what's going on, but the plot precludes us from discovering how she feels about her role until its over.

Terry Dodson's art was an unexpected delight, though: nice, clean, and vaguely cartoony.  I got tired of Luke Ross's well-rounded butt shots, though, and the less said about Marc Silvestri's identical faces for women and poor story-telling skills, the better.

I was delighted to see Mike Carey here, after enjoying his work on Lucifer so much, and joined by Dustin Weaver, one of the better artists on Knights of the Old Republic, but their story (about what Rogue gets up to during the riots in the first chapter) feels like a pointless fill-in.  Otherwise, I found the rest of this volume fairly disposable.