Today’s Comic> Star Wars Adventures FCBD 2019

Has should be worried. They’re all his kids.

Star Wars Adventures Free Comic Book Day 2019

IDW Publishing (May, 2019)

Tales From Vader’s Castle: “Droid Hunters”

WRITER: Cavan Scott

ARTIST: Derek Charm

LETTERER: Tom B. Long

ASSISTANT EDITOR: Elizabeth Brei

EDITOR: Denton J. Tipton

Two Rebels are walking around an old castle, Lina and her droid, Crater. Crater goes on about another member of their team they lost contact with and is sure he’s busy robbing the place again. Somehow this leads into a story taking place around the period of Solo: A Star Wars Story. (I think because I haven’t seen the movie.) Han and Chewbacca are relaxing in their favorite bar when they run into a man being chased by a pirate named Gwarm, who is after a trio of droids, one of which has a map to a great treasure and the other two booby-trapped. Of course they have to go through all three before finally finding the right one, but it turns out the other guy actually works for Gwarm, who was using him to set off the booby-traps. They’re all fooled because the “treasure” are actually other pirates who crashed on the planet and just want to escape. They take Gwarm’s but Han and Chewie manage to get away and disable their ship. In the present Lina doesn’t see the point of telling the story although she gets the message, both unaware that they’re being watched by Vader. As the title says, this is HIS castle.

What they got right: As I said, the story itself is fun and I do enjoy the artwork. It is nice to see Han and Chewbacca’s days before meeting Luke and Obi-Wan.

What they got wrong: I know the series or graphic novel this comes from is supposed to be some kind of Halloween inspired anthology book (the pirates in the stasis pods are some kind of cyborg zombies from their design) but it does seem odd that sneaking around an Empire-held stronghold is considered a good time to tell ghost stories. I also don’t know how Crater learned of this story, or how the pirate cyber-zombies got those droids out there to bring some sucker in…or why it took so long or how the droids got scattered to the various jobs, but admittedly none of this takes away from the story. It’s just stuff you need to think about as a writer if you want the story to make sense, and this is about improving my own craft and avoiding these kinds of pitfalls.

Recommendation: As I said, it’s a good story. While I don’t know why Disney/Marvel didn’t just let Dark Horse continue this series if they’re not going to do the kids comics anyway (outside of Dark Horse being responsible for much of that expanded universe J.J. Abrams tossed in the garbage compactor) at least they’re still making fun Star Wars stories. Worth looking into the full graphic novel or miniseries or whatever if this is a good example of what’s in it.