Star Wars Addiction

January 26, 2008

The curiously numbered Legacy #0 ½, a ‘sequel’ of sorts to 2006’s Legacy #0, offers a comprehensive retrospective of the stellar comic series, providing a point of reference for overwhelmed newbs, as well as a visual feast featuring illustrations from all the series’ contributing artists.

While the issue doesn’t follow the standard comic narrative format, with its sparse dialogue and floating word bubbles, there is some depth to be found in the prose, penned by series creator John Ostrander and Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley. Most of the entries are encyclopedic, covering subjects ranging from the city planet of Coruscant, to the Imperial spy Morrigan Corde, to the Galactic Alliance Crossfire starfighter. While the text is never as engaging as its narrative equivalent in the series proper (reading much like the Legacy Wikipedia articles), it does cover a broad range and even reminded this veteran reader of a couple important plot points.

That said, the artwork is the real reason to pick up a copy of 0 ½, and the pencils of Jan Duursema, Dan Parsons, Sean Cooke, Colin Wilson, Adam Hughes, and Douglas Wheatley never disappoint. The panels show a deeper, darker Star Wars galaxy, one that has survived the Yuuzhan Vong armageddon but bears the scars to prove it. Of particular note are the Vong-scapes of the reformed Coruscant; its at once grotesque and beautiful to see the vividly imagined reshaping of the galactic center that shone so brightly in the prequel films, and now, through the New Jedi Order and on in to the Legacy era, has become a very literal urban jungle that is decaying from without as well as within.

Also noteworthy are the three-view starship renderings. Thus far, the Legacy series has eschewed the traditional, almost mandatory, epic space battle that looms omni-present in nearly every piece of Star Wars fiction. Ships are present in Legacy, of course, but they’re decidedly in the background, and its nice to see them finally presented in full detail.

Finally, the strength of the Legacy series thus far has been the characters, from the classic anti-hero Cade Skywalker and his sinewy Sith Lord lover Darth Talon, to the fearsome Darth Krayt and his eerie menagerie of Sith lieutenants, Legacy’s larger than life personalities are in fine form in issue 0 ½, even sans dialogue or narrative purpose.

Ultimately, if you’re a fan of the series, 0 ½ belongs in your collection, even though it does nothing to advance the story. It reminded me of the original trilogy storybooks that I used to love as a kid; glossy, expertly produced, and adept at capturing the spiritual essence of a larger body of work.


	DarthDan January 26, 2008 Comment 1 Nice. I really enjoyed Legacy #0 that I picked up last year. I remember how cool the concept art and storyboards of the TIE and SSD descendants were. Looks like they did the same again with some of the other models and characters that appear later on in the series. RebelFox January 27, 2008 Comment 2 Nice coverage of the spread, Master Jef. I actually don't mind that the starships have taken a backseat. This is one of the most mature and morally ambiguous pieces of SW fiction ever. (What's with all the weird question marks? I am the only one seeing those?) Angyll January 27, 2008 Comment 3 QUOTE(JediFox @ January 27 2008, 03:14 PM) Nice coverage of the spread, Master Jef. I actually don't mind that the starships have taken a backseat. This is one of the most mature and morally ambiguous pieces of SW fiction ever. (What's with all the weird question marks? I am the only one seeing those?) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I think you are...I don't see any. How old is your browser? JediJef January 27, 2008 Comment 4 That's a recurring issue we're having with this board software. What browser are you using, out of curiosity (manufacturer and version number, for example IE6, Firefox 2, etc)? Dalamar January 27, 2008 Comment 5 It is caused by Jef writing his article in MS Word, which uses special symbols which are not part of the character set that your browser is using to display the page. This is why you are seeing question marks in place of the 1/2 symbol. To fix it, set your browser's character encoding setting to Western (ISO-8859-1). In both IE6 and Firefox, this is in the View menu. JediJef January 27, 2008 Comment 6 Its not just fractions, it also inserts question marks for apostrophe characters; you can see this in several older articles. Funny thing is, they displayed correctly when they were first published, and only started displaying the question marks at a later date.