I’ve had an enthusiastically positive response to Lucasfilm Publishing’s multi-platform Star Wars: The High Republic initiative so far, but the output that has me by far the most jazzed for this project is undeniably the Marvel comic book. Last month’s debut issue caught me off guard with the sheer amount of vibrancy it breathed into the interwoven overarching story, and I loved that it gave me a better sense of how these individual projects will overlap and tie into each other as The High Republic continues over the next few years.
That issue also happened to end where the three existing novels in Star Wars: The High Republic (Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi, Justina Ireland’s A Test of Courage, and Claudia Gray’s Into the Dark) also wound up: with the grand opening ribbon-cutting ceremony of the Starlight Beacon, a space station intended to bring order and a larger New Republic presence– led by the Jedi– to the Outer Rim. So now issue #2, out today, gets to take a bold leap forward in High Republic storytelling by showing us what exactly the Jedi headquartered at Starlight Beacon are up to after the space-dust of the Great Disaster has settled on the galaxy.
We pick up with newly knighted Jedi Keeve Trennis answering a distress beacon with her Trandoshan former master Sskeer (words cannot express how much I want a Sskeer action figure) and the idiosyncratic identical Kotabi bond-twins Ceret and Terec. Together they find floating in space an ambushed and pillaged Hutt vessel, which based on the evidence at hand they conclude had been attacked by the Nihil, a vicious band of marauders well-established elsewhere in High Republic continuity. This leads to paranoia and a frenzied conflict in the derelict remnants of the ship, plus a clue that sends Sskeer and Ceret to a farming planet named Sedri Minor, where they investigate the Hutts’ interest in one of the key ingredients in making the revitalizing liquid called bacta and begin to wonder why the residents there don’t seem to want the Jedi around.
But far and away the most interesting element of this all-around exciting comic book is the continued deterioration of Sskeer’s mental state. We got a hint of that decline in last issue’s cliffhanger, but here we learn that he’s suffering from a clear-cut case of post-traumatic stress disorder after the space battle against the Nihil in which he (temporarily) lost his arm, which is pushing him dangerously close to giving in to the dark side of the Force and its alarming tendencies toward rage and loss of control. Sskeer is shaping up to be a very intriguing character in this series indeed, if I’m reading the indications of his darker path correctly. There’s another cliffhanger this month involving Ceret’s status on Sedri Minor, but I was mostly left wondering how Sskeer will respond to the situation considering his already tenuous mental state. Star Wars: The High Republic writer Cavan Scott already has me on the edge of my seat just two issues in, and the energetic artwork by Ario Anindito (with a special shoutout to colorist Annalisa Leoni for the eerily atmospheric locales in this installment) goes a long way in helping that happen as well.
Star Wars: The High Republic #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.