Last week, Marvel Comics released the fourth and final issue in its Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red miniseries, and in my opinion this exciting installment sends the experiment off with a bang.
Darth Vader – Black, White & Red #4 (presented, as were the previous three issues, using only the three colors represented in the miniseries’ title) begins by wrapping up the overarching “Hard Shutdown” storyline written by Jason Aaron with art by penciler Leonard Kirk, inker Mark Morales, and colorist Romulo Fajardo Jr. This narrative started with a group of cyborg radicals capturing the titular Dark Lord of the Sith and deactivating his life-support systems, but of course it ends with Vader wiping them all out, Rogue One-style. And that’s a trend that will continue throughout this issue, which is mostly about showing off what a badass the Sith Lord is– not that I’m complaining about that. It’s always just a tremendous amount of fun to watch Darth Vader let loose on his enemies, and these three stories are definitely no exception. The second tale in issue #4 is undoubtedly my favorite, as writer Steve Orlando (of DC’s Midnighter) and artist Paul Davidson (X-Force) take things decidedly outside the box by having Vader battle a microscopic pathogen invading his own mind after scouting a desolate new planet for the Empire to mine. I absolutely loved how inventive this story is, with the title character confined to a Bacta tank and in the care of a medical droid for most of the proceedings, and dueling against a new adversary called Ghymnon, who he only sees through his disease-raddled “hallucinations.”
Naturally, Vader is such a master of his own twisted psyche that he’s able to defeat Ghymnon and expel the pathogen, but watching him do so is a giddy pleasure. The third story sends the Dark Lord back to the ice planet Hoth when an Imperial probe droid’s signal suddenly gets cut off some time after the events of The Empire Strikes Back. And white this tale is mostly about Vader combating a number of Wampas, it’s still a blast to watch him return to such a famous Star Wars location and rummage through the smoldering wreckage of Echo Base. Here writer Frank Tieri (Wolverine) and artist Danny Earls (a professional footballer recently turned comic artist) change things up a bit by making the Dark Lord a little bit more vulnerable to the Wampas’ wrath, though Vader does survive the attacks, of course, and he gets to take out his frustrations on the probably-too-honest Imperial officer who rescues him from the cold of Hoth. This entire issue had me pretty jazzed, and kind of sad to see the miniseries come to an end. I’d love to see more experiments in this style using other Star Wars characters and/or color palettes. But mostly I’d really like it if Marvel were to bring in Steve Orlando to write more Vader, maybe after Greg Pak ends his current run on the ongoing Star Wars: Darth Vader title. For whatever reason, Orlando just seems to have immediately nailed that character’s voice and seems willing to take him places we haven’t seen the Dark Lord of the Sith go before.
Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red #4 is available now wherever comic books are sold.