Last week saw the release of the debut issue in the new Star Wars: Darth Maul – Black, White & Red miniseries from Marvel Comics, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this first installment.
Just about a year ago, Marvel Comics (in its ongoing, extremely fruitful collaboration with Lucasfilm Publishing) brought us Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red, an anthology series that– in the tradition of other similar Marvel titles– utilized, to great effect, only the three colors contained within its title. Now we have a follow-up on that miniseries entitled Darth Maul – Black, White & Red that makes use of the same color strategy, albeit in a somewhat different format. Instead of multiple short stories by a variety of writers and artists all contained within the same issue, this Maul version appears to be taking the route of one story per issue, which works just as well for other reasons. In issue #1, writer Benjamin Percy (of Marvel’s Hellverine series) and artist Stefano Raffaele (Spider-Man 2099) bring us a gorgeously rendered tale of Darth Sidious sending the titular Dark Lord of the Sith on a mission to recover a prison ship containing enemies that seek to bring down the Sith master and apprentice before they can even reveal themselves to the galaxy.
These enemies belong to a heretofore unmentioned dark-side cult called the Final Occultation that thrives on chaos instead of order. Three beings specifically– newly introduced here– named Heldi Cerebron, Vasik Aldritch, and one whose name remains unknown, become targets of Maul’s quest, though he privately worries that Palpatine desires to harness their power instead of simply eliminating it altogether. I absolutely adored how Percy, Raffaelle, and colorist Raul Angulo leaned into the mind-warping, Lovecraftian horror side of Star Wars in this story, moreso perhaps than we’ve ever seen before. The drawing are haunting in their depiction of these creatures, and the sparing use of color only further accentuates their physical and existential threats to the title character, who has yet to undergo the transformation we see much later on in the timeline… this issue being set prior to the events of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
If this debut issue is any indication, we’re in for a real treat over the next few months as Darth Maul – Black, White & Red continues to roll out. Although I’m very curious to see if the writers and artists chosen by Marvel Comics for this miniseries will continue to focus on Maul during his time as Sith apprentice under Lord Sidious, or if we’ll get to see his post-prequel-trilogy adventures after he drops the “Darth” title from his name. Either way, this experiment is off to a great start, and I’ll say that the longer-form storytelling has me even more invested than I was with the Darth Vader version. I really like the narrative freedom and visual flair this approach to Star Wars storytelling offers its creative talent, and I’m looking forward to more.
Star Wars: Darth Maul – Black, White & Red #1 is available now wherever comic books are sold.