Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"I have endured great suffering as part of my training.
"All so I might be an instrument of revenge.
"All so I can kill Jedi.
"But not today."
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I kill you tomorrow... hmm... pretty sure Darth Maul isn't a fan of musicals, even if he and Annie are both redheads...
Well, I think we can now all universally agree that the three Star Wars prequels were pretty much bantha dung, right? For me, about the only bright point of that ill-executed trilogy was this attitude-enhanced, double-lightsabre-twirling bad boy himself. By the time we reached his climatic battle with that laugh-a-minute comedy duo Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan, I was so sick of Ewan McGregor's received pronunciation, in a rather herniated attempt to emulate Alec Guiness, that I was willing Darth Maul to dish out an elocution lesson that involved removing the Padawan's voice box.
But sadly, we know how that turned out, meaning the subsequent Clone War cartoons (what, you thought Padawan Kenobi actually killed Darth Maul, suckers? Hahaha have a spoiler!) and now these prequel comics are all we have of the snarling Sith.
Cullen Bunn does an excellent job capturing the barely checked blood lust of Darth Sidious' irascible apprentice and in fact makes that an essential tenet of the story. Here, Darth Maul can't help disappearing off on a Jedi hunt when he hears a young Padawan has been captured by pirates and is going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. And if Darth Maul has to go through a fleet of space corsairs, plus various ne'er do wells intent on every conceivable type of Jedi harm and even the galactic equivalent of David Dickinson to get his bargain, I mean, Sith vs. Jedi death duel, well he's going to do just that. And so he does...
Which I will grant you sounds a remarkably thin premise for a great story, but in fact Bunn fleshes it out thicker than a Hutt's belly, throwing in some great secondary and tertiary characters, mostly engaged in so much double and triple crossing I thought they might wear the carpet out, which is never advisable when you're floating in space, so that the whole story really comes to life. Well, ends in death, actually, repeatedly, brutally, and in some quite inventive ways.
Luke Ross is an excellent addition to the Marvel Star Wars artists stable. I've commented before that they seem to prefer using people with relatively straightforward but very polished art styles, presumably to enhance rather than potentially distract from the story telling, to provide an almost cinematic flow to proceedings, and Ross certainly succeeds in that respect. Definitely one of the better individual character Star Wars titles to date by some several parsecs.
