Marco Checcheto’s covers are phenomenal, but Ethan Sacks’s story and interior art by Luke Ross never do them justice. Meant to serve as a bridge between the fallout from The Last Jedi and the forthcoming film, The Rise of Skywalker, the story doesn’t do as much as it potentially could with its four issues, and that likely comes down to editorial mandates from the Lucasfilm story group.
The book as a whole, right up through its anticlimactic non-ending, is largely an unsatisfying appetizer for the main course that will be Episode IX due out in a couple more weeks. The story is paper thin, revolving around General Organa’s attempts to bring the Mon Calamari to the side of the Resistance. Finn and Poe, meanwhile, are trying to secure an old Rebel-era weapons cache as they’re being tracked by bounty hunters.
We do get some neat scenes illustrating just how evil The First Order has become under now-Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, who carries out acts of violence against neutral worlds where not even the Empire stooped so low, but there’s not much else happening here. Sacks’s dialogue doesn’t always ring true, and Ross’s art is largely unformed, giving his characters shape but little in the way of actual definition. Poe, for instance, is largely unrecognizable and there are times where Chewbacca looks more like the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz than a threatening Wookie. For the most part, Ross’s pencils give us rough approximations of each of these characters, but there’s nothing visually interesting or engaging to really latch on to, and sadly the same is true of Sacks’s script work. It’s almost as if Sacks was told to stay away from anything conceptually interesting or plot points with definitive weight, so we don’t get to see Rey really engage with her Jedi training beyond anything we’ve already seen in The Last Jedi, right down to a riff on the ‘moving rocks’ climax of that film, only here it’s some cargo crates Force-pushed to create a timely barrier.
I kept hoping something meatier was going to happen story-wise, and then, wouldn’t you know it, I hit the last page of the fourth issue and the book was done. My advice? Skip this book and instead pick up Rebecca Roanhorse’s prose novel, Rebellion Reborn for your Journey to the Rise of Skywalker fix.