Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Wild Space by Karen Miller

Have I been forgetting to mention all my Unreality SF reviews here? If so, here are the last few, all Doctor Who tales: Tenth Doctor Adventures, Volume 1, The Early Adventures: The Black Hole, and Criss-Cross, Planet of the Rani, and Shield of the Jötunn.

Mass market paperback, 342 pages
Published 2009 (originally 2008)

Acquired August 2014
Read September 2014

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Wild Space
by Karen Miller

This is the second of the two Clone Wars books I read in parallel to watching the television series before my viewing of the series sputtered out. Flipping back through it, I find that I remember nothing of it, save that Obi-Wan seemed out of character, and that it felt like the book went on blasted forever with nothing happening. This is Star Wars, people, throw me some action.

Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars by Karen Traviss

Mass market paperback, 256 pages
Published 2009 (originally 2008)

Acquired and read August 2014

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
by Karen Traviss

A couple years ago, I decided to watch the Clone Wars cartoon from beginning to end, and read the tie-in novels and comics alongside it. I didn't get very far, but that wasn't really the show's fault. I did get far enough to read two of the novels, the first of which, simply titled The Clone Wars, novelizes the events of the film that kicked off the series. Quite frankly, Karen Traviss's talents are wasted on the pile of shit that was the film's script-- things like Jabba's gay cousin do not need any fleshing out, and like Diane Carey, she delights a little too much in having characters inwardly snark about how the events/dialogue of the story are implausible or bad. That doesn't rectify the problems, it just makes you think you should be reading a different book, given the book's own author doesn't even like it. Traviss's Star Wars books are distinguished for her depth of characterization, but there's nothing to pin that to here, and her dislike of significant components of the Star Wars concept becomes a little too obvious in places. Traviss writing clone characters is always appreciated, though.

Small-Scale Star Wars

Comic digest, 76 pages
Published 2010
Acquired January 2011
Read April 2012

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Deadly Hands of Shon-Ju

Script: Jeremy Barlow
Art: Brian Koschak
Colors: Ronda Pattinson
Lettering: Michael Heisler

This is an okay little story featuring Aalya Secura coming into contact with a Force cult that has forgone the lightsaber in favor of using their Force-amplified hands in combat: they punch rocks to break them, and so on.  A neat idea, but not fully explored because in a twist that will surprise no one, this non-Jedi group is EVIL.  As are all the bad guys, actually, none of whom who do things for reasons beyond getting their EVIL on.  Barlow has done better.

Archival Review: Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, Volume 9 by the Fillbach Brothers

Comic digest, 80 pages
Published 2007
Acquired October 2007
Read November 2007

Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, Volume 9

Writers: the Fillbach Brothers

Art: the Fillbach Brothers

Colorists: Ronda Pattinson, Pamela Rambo, Dan Jackson, Tony Avina

Letterer: Michael Heisler

When this series of short comic stories done in the style of Cartoon Network's Clone Wars cartoons started back in 2004, I was pretty tepid-- how much for a book that small? The first volume, by regular Republic writer Haden Blackman, didn't really impress either. But my determination to gather all literary incarnations of the saga of the Clone Wars demanded I go on, and so I did. Fortunately, the series improved with time, as the writers came to understand the kinds of stories the highly visually stylized art was best suited to tell.

And because of that, some of the best stories have been consistently penned by the Fillbach Brothers, who first began serving on the series as artists. This of course made the prospect of Volume 9, as an all-Fillbach spectacular, highly appealing to me. And fortunately, it did not disappoint. It features four stories of the usual types in this series-- a dialogue-light "giant creature" story, a clone trooper story, a spy story, and battling Jedi story-- and pulls them all off with aplomb. Mindless fun, but superbly done mindless fun. Though it probably took me longer to write this review than it did to read the book.