Credits:
Written by Tom Veitch
Drawn by
Lettering by Todd
Klein
Cover Art by Dave
Dorman
There's an image in
DARK EMPIRE that captures the imagination of any Star Wars fan and causes one
great pause. It comes early on: Leia Organa and Han Solo have rendezvoused with
Lando Calrissian on a mysterious planet where Lando and Luke crash-landed. Luke
is missing; he went off into the desert the moment they set down, and now while
they wait for him, those terrifyingly silly AT-AT Imperial Walkers bear down
upon our heroes. And here's the moment: out of the wilderness comes Luke
Skywalker, clad and caped in black. He strides like a Dark Lord onto the field
and single-handedly destroys the AT-AT with the tiniest of gestures.
The last time Luke
destroyed an AT-AT, remember how he did it? He narrowly avoided being crushed
under the AT-AT's foot, fired a grappling hook into its underbelly, climbed up,
tossed a grenade, and jumped away. Now, seven years later, he steps out in
front of one, holds up a gloved hand, and watches it disintegrate.
Luke, in DARK EMPIRE,
has come a long way, and he's gotten a little scary. There's a moment later on,
when Leia receives a vision from her brother, a telepathic message. At first
she doesn't know she's talking to Luke, because the image she sees is the black
mask of the twins' father, Lord Vader. The mistake is apt: DARK EMPIRE is the
story of Luke Skywalker's intense little dance with the devil as he gives
himself over to the dark side in hopes of destroying the darkness from within.
Does that sound like
a good plan? Leia doesn't think so, even though Luke insists he knows what he's
doing when he allows himself to fall into the hands of a great Dark Side
entity. Soon Luke is at the right hand of someone we thought was still burning
at the bottom of a shaft: Emperor Palpatine, who apparently has the lives of a
cloned cat.
Soon Leia, pregnant
and girthy in a flowing robe and ironed hair, is on the way back to the
Emperor's latest horrible station to save Luke. This scene echoes the final
moments from RETURN OF THE JEDI, only here, it is Luke who has gone too deep,
and doubts his ability to turn.
DARK EMPIRE was not
(but could have been) a novel- - Tom Veitch wrote this story strictly for
comics, and the comic is the only way to read it. The story moves quickly, but
Veitch has a good feel for the implications of the power of the Skywalker
family and the easy enticements of evil. The most I ask from a comic adaptation
is a few moments of thought: "Cool, what a great idea..." and Veitch
delivers that. In this story, you get a good feel for Luke Skywalker skating
the very inside edge of sanity and goodness. And judging by how powerful he
looks when he brings down that AT-AT, you half wish he'd fall in. There's pain,
though, in the scene where Han Solo vows to kill Luke if he has to, to prevent
the kind of destruction Luke's father was capable of. Add to that the brooding,
muscular art of Cam Kennedy, and you have a great read.
In the back of the
book, there's also a source book of sorts, a series of essays explaining
various concepts that crop up here for the first time and will be used in other
STAR WARS titles, while it goes through the story of DARK EMPIRE. This is a
helpful resource for later titles, and I can see why the editors included it- -
especially given the inherent space considerations of a comic story.
So there we are.
There's a whole slew of STAR WARS material from Dark Horse, but DARK EMPIRE,
with its images of what could be, is one of the best.