Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Volume 1: Commencement [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I just recently started playing KOTOR again, and saw this book at my local comic shop and decided to pick it up. I got home that same evening and was going to browse through it while I waited for the game to load. Instead, I ended up reading it cover to cover and forgot all about the game! It's great! I became so totally immersed in the story that the next day, I went out and picked up issues 7-12. I recommend it even if you've never played the games.

It seems no one is able to come up with a fresh angle on Star Wars.

Here we have a new series set four millennia prior to the Anakin/Luke saga, a wonderful opportunity to do something different, to try on some new clothes, to even do an extensive makeover. What we get is a rearrangement of the essential elements: a Jedi-centric story featuring a white teenage boy set in the midst of a galaxy-wide war populated with the same old species playing the same tired roles.

The story is the film prequel in reverse. Our "hero," Zayne Carrick, is the evil chosen one, a padawan feared by a secret group of Jedi seers to be the next Sith Lord. Framing Carrick for murder, the Jedi cabal intends to arrest and then liquidate him - and all on a very flimsy pretense. In a seance-like trance, the seers have a joint vision of a Sith in a red suit. And, by gosh, Garrick has a red environment suit that looks eerily similar, in a trance induced dream-like way. Even George Bush had more credible evidence for his adventure in Iraq.

Zayne turns the tables by escaping and promising to hunt down every last one of the seers in order to clear his name. So rather than a chosen one who turns out to be the Jedi's nemesis, we have a supposed Sith Lord who appears set to save the Jedi - and the universe.

Admittedly, this is a clever plotting twist and not the only surprise writer John Jackson Miller has up his sleeve. In fact, given the warmed-over flavor of the concept, it's Miller's scripting and plotting chops that rescue the series from utter mediocrity. Besides a sharp wit and deft sense of comic timing, his writing is crisp and cinematic, with no exposition to slow the pace of events. He's aided and abetted by Brian Ching's pencils, some very sharp art that is sorely missed in Travel Forman's anime-style fifth chapter.

To be fair, Dark Horse and Miller may not be entirely to blame for the repackaged characters and plot devices. With two best-selling video games built around this era, Lucas Arts no doubt also had a say. While you need not have played the games to enjoy these comics, it might help if you haven't read or watched too much Star Wars. For those that have, you can play spot-the-retread:

+ Jedi obsessed with the reappearance, after a long period of inactivity, of the Sith
+ A Jedi council that despite its collection of big brains doesn't have a collective idea of what goes on among its members
+ Yoda leading the Jedi academy (actually, he has another name and a little more hair, but otherwise he's Yoda)
+ The Jedi council chamber looking the same as 1000 years later
+ A junk heap of a ship that breaks down at inopportune moments
+ Spaceships escaping pursuit in asteroid fields
+ Self-absorbed drifters and shady merchants who abandon the hero, only to return to rescue him from certain death

While Star Wars fans have come to expect this kind of patchwork storytelling in the EU, it would be of great service to the Star Wars universe as a whole if writers didn't borrow every latest addition and shoe-horn it into stories set in the far past. It makes for a static universe. In Commencement, for example, we have a Jedi talking about the "Living Force," a concept first introduced through Qui Gon Jinn. By the time it appears now in The Phantom Menace it is a tired and perhaps even trite conception. The same goes for "Shatterpoint," from the Clone Wars novel of the same name. Mace Windu's ability to perceive the universe as a woven object with points of stress, weakness, vulnerabilities - shatterpoints - is as a result of the millennial retrofit now stripped of any special associations with Windu or the Clone Wars. This same process of over-drawing from the idea-bank applies as well to species. One of Commencement's minor characters, a restaurant manager, is a Besalisk, who fans know most commonly as the four-armed biped Dex, the diner proprietor from Attack of the Clones. Besides robbing this species of a history that might have involved being discovered in the four thousand years between KOTOR and the Clone Wars, the Besalisk are now under threat for the next four millennia of being relegated to service in the food and beverage industry.

Miller and Dark Horse aren't the only ones guilty of this kind of clumsy universe crafting and I mention it here only because this volume offers a few choice examples. Despite its flaws, though, Commencement is a better than average comic and a lot more entertaining than the current novel series, Legacy of the Force. I'm looking forward to the next chapter - and hoping to see a little more originality.

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It's nearly 4,000 years before the birth of Luke Skywalker. Zayne Carrick is a Jedi initiate with some minor abilities in the Force and a ton of bad luck. Stationed with a team of Jedi masters and four peers in training on a planet on the outskirts of a war-torn region of space, Zayne is expecting to fail when the other initiates are knighted into the Jedi order. But when he arrives at the ceremony, he finds his friends dead at the hands of their masters. He escapes before he too can be murdered, and he soon finds himself on the run along with a handful of fellow fugitives.

This is the first chapter of what looks to be a fascinating story by John Jackson Miller. Brian Ching and Travel Foreman provide bold, colorful art to tell the tale. Zayne is an interesting character who, like the future Luke, is forced by circumstances to rise to the occasion. The question is, will he seek justice -- or revenge?

by Tom Knapp, Rambles.(n e t) editor