The cover of issue #33 of Marvel’s current flagship Star Wars comic book depicts Luke Skywalker reeling from the destruction of his current yellow lightsaber as Darth Vader’s working red-bladed lightsaber approaches from the foreground. One of these things happens within the pages of this comic (the saber gets busted) and one does not, but Luke does mention needing a new weapon before he confronts his father in battle again, so I guess that’s what they were going for?
Anyway, my nitpicking the misleading cover (again) doesn’t detract from Star Wars #33 being another really good issue written by Charles Soule, and illustrated by fill-in artist Madibek Musabekov (Star Wars: Obi-Wan) who turns in pretty consistently solid work as well.
This issue, of course, starts where the previous cliffhanger left off– with Luke Skywalker literally being dangled off a cliff on the platform known as the Great Hall in the uncharted area of the galaxy called No-Space. Luke, Lando, Calrissian, Amilyn Holdo, and Chewbacca struggle in their battle against a horde of kill-droids, until our would-be Jedi hero finds access to the Force once again and sends the murderous droids off the platform into the void of space. He retrieves the Jedi text he was so worried about last month then collapses, waking up sometime later in the Kezarat Colony, where he and his friends bring the good news to Captain Blythe– in addition to eliminating the kill-droids, they managed to retrieve the Nihil Path engine. This begs the question of how many members of the colony will be leaving with our rebel protagonists, but first Lando and Princess Leia have some rather bad news to break about the sorry state of the outside galaxy (namely the existence of the Empire and the Galactic Civil War). Eventually the choice is made for some of the colonists to stay and make a new home on the newly safe Great Hall, while others will return with the rebels. Meanwhile the budding relationship between Lando and Holdo continues to percolate, though I think we have a pretty good idea from other Star Wars media that they won’t last forever as a couple.
So the team bundles together all of the Kezarat Colony’s ships and Lobot uses the Path engine to jump back into the known galaxy, where our heroes reunite with the Rebel Alliance fleet. Luke gets a new cybernetic hand, the previous one having been crushed by a kill-droid, and then (as I mentioned above) ponders the need to craft himself a new lightsaber. I’m loving that this is pointing toward Skywalker finally making the green-bladed one we saw in Return of the Jedi, since (as I wrote in my Hidden Empire review earlier today) I think it’s getting to be about time that the Star Wars comics move on to catching up with the events of that film. But other than that and the aforementioned quibble with the cover, I really don’t have a lot to complain about here– I’d say this is a pretty satisfying conclusion to an arc that both tied in this main Star Wars title with The High Republic and got Luke and company out of the way for the Hidden Empire finale, which is referenced here as well. There’s a Force wave echoing through the galaxy, caused by the opening of the Fermata Cage, and the implications of that far-reaching event are still being felt across all the ongoing Marvel Star Wars comics. Here it helped Luke summon the energy to dispel the kill-droids, but what other effects will it have? I’m definitely looking forward to finding out.
Star Wars #33 is available now wherever comic books are sold.