And may the Force be with you

Starcat reviews Star Wars comics: STAR WARS (part five)

The story so far: The moon with the rebel base will be in range in 30 minutes.

The Millennium Falcon has arrived at the rebel base and our heroes have joined up with the rebels there. The caption says "five of the six" and I know I am not good at counting but I think it is wrong and there are six of the six there. They are:

1. C3PO
2. R2D2
3. Luke Skywalker
4. Han Solo
5. Chewbacca, and
6. Princess Leia

See, I was right.

We meet two minor characters who are with the rebels, they are named as Commander Willard and General Jan Dodonna. Han Solo calls General Jan Dodonna an "old coot" lol. The briefing he gives to the other rebels is very close to the one in the film, including Luke's confidence that their plan can succeed.

General Jan Dodonna finishes by saying 

-- and may the Force be with you!

And he emphasises this by pointing outside the frame of the panel. This means it is Serious Business.

For no readily apparent reason Red Squadron from the film has been replaced with Blue Squadron, and Luke is Blue Five instead of Red Five. Big Gay Longcat, who has both red stripes and blue stripes because he is a rainbow stripey cat, says this doesn't matter, but I am confused as to why anybody would want to make such a needless change.

The battle at the Death Star takes many pages (I count 11, but it depends what you allow as the battle) so it is much less compressed in the comic compared to other parts of the story. That is because it is dramatically very important, what with being the final rising action leading to the destruction of the Death Star at the climax. It is perhaps also because action set-pieces such as in these scenes are very suited to the medium of comics, but take more pages to play out than they do minutes in a film.

Lord Darth Vader decides to join in the battle and leads the baddy spaceships personally.

He quickly proves to be as good with his spaceship as he was earlier with his lightsabre so that we know he is a threat to Luke and to our heroes' plans and hope of winning.

As if reflecting the hopelessness of our heroes, the story returns to black and white suddenly.

Blue Leader, introduced as a character only four pages ago, is killed off by Darth Vader to reinforce the seriousness of the threat he presents. He gets a shot at destroying the Death Star first, and only just misses, which is a nice touch to show that the rebels aren't all useless except for main characters.

With this point being about the darkest hour for the rebels, I will leave it for now. Even though I am in the middle of a page. Join me next time for our moment of triumph.