Yesterday saw the release of issue #2 in Dark Horse Comics’ Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures Phase III, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
In my review of the middle-grade novel Star Wars: The High Republic – Escape from Valo earlier this week, I talked about how author Daniel José Older’s approach to writing Jedi sometimes rubs me the wrong way. But if I had to boil down that distaste in one example, it would be “group hugs.” For whatever reason, group hugs just seem decidedly un-Jedi to me, and Older drops them in a lot. Even this month’s new issue of The High Republic Adventures ends with a group hug on the final page, which is what made me realize that the phenomenon is emblematic of what often feels off to me in his particular take on the Jedi Order. That being said, I thought most of the rest of this installment was very good, which just goes to show that I can still enjoy Older’s writing despite my perception of certain aspects of the Star Wars universe clearly being very different from his.
The High Republic Adventures (2023) #2 opens with a flashback– gorgeously illustrated by artist Nick Brokenshire of Star Wars Adventures and Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories— to Jedi Padawan Lula Talisola waking up on a beach on the planet Eiram after the fall of the Republic space station Starlight Beacon. Lula finds herself suffering from amnesia, which as a story device is a little cliche and soap-opera-y, but it works here for the purposes of this book. She dons Nihil garb collected from the corpses around her and makes her way to the city, where she is attacked and then is surprised to find that she has the ability to control the Force in her own defense. She steals a ship and makes her way out into space, and then Older chooses to cut back to the “present” of Phase III, now drawn by The High Republic Adventures’ regular penciller Harvey Tolibao.
The remainder of this issue is about Lula and her similarly Force-sensitive (though non-Jedi) Mikkian girlfriend Zeen Mrala escaping the Nihil stronghold where Talisola was posing as the warlord Tartak Vil. They have help in the form of the newly minted Aloxian Jedi Knight Qort, and together they manage to evade the horde of other Mikkians who have arrived on this planet in response to the message Lula had sent out (see the previous issue). It’s a very fun, straightforward, and to-the-point narrative with lots of action and very little dialogue, an approach that also works quite well in this case. Maybe I just like Daniel José Older’s comic-book writing more than his prose– which was certainly the case with 2021’s excellent Star Wars: The High Republic – Trail of Shadows miniseries)– but almost everything here just clicked for me. I could just do with fewer group hugs among Jedi and their pals in the future.
Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.