In the latest issue of Star Wars: Bounty Hunters from Marvel Comics, Boba Fett joins the titular team of antiheroes for a mission against the crime syndicate known as Black Sun.
Bounty Hunters #36, released today, begins on the Corellian YT-series ship called the Enigma Catalyst, which is owned by the scoundrel Khel Tanna. But right now Khel has been enlisted by T’onga and her bounty hunter crew (currently including the shapeshifting Clawdite Catak, Dathomirian assassin Deathstick, Trandoshan hunter Bossk, the fearsome Gen’Dai Durge, the partners 4-LOM and Zuckuss, and the cyborg Beilert Valance, who is quickly losing his memory) on a very specific mission. This task has united them with the infamous Boba Fett, who has information about a cybernetics expert that may be able to salvage Valance’s deteriorating mind (which can’t even remember who his friends are)… but first, Fett needs the team’s help in completing a bounty of his own. Together they travel to Quantxi, the junk moon of Ord Mantell, where Boba Fett pretends to have been captured and turned over to a group of Falleen Black Sun gangsters led by Lord Xanak Grunseit, who indirectly claims to be a cousin of Prince Xizor, current leader of the Black Sun– I get a kick out of any canonical reference to this green-skinned crime-boss character from the Legends continuity, though he doesn’t actually get called out by name here.
Anyway, these Black Sun members ambush Fett and company before they even have the chance to turn the tables on the Falleen, and most of the rest of this issue is one big fight scene between the bounty hunters and the mobsters. We get some entertaining action setpieces featuring Fett, Valance, Durge, and others, though sometimes the art by Lan Medina is staged in a clunky manner that makes the battle choreography somewhat difficult to follow. Regardless, it’s fairly safe to assume that our lead characters will come out on top, and writer Ethan Sacks cleverly has Boba Fett reveal to Grunseit that he is not working for the Hutts– as the Falleen Lord had assumed– but rather for his cousin (read Xizor) as the Mandalorian-armored hunter takes out this pretender to the Black Sun throne. Then Fett turns over the info about the cyberneticist, which he implies came from his father Jango Fett, and takes off in the Slave I, leaving the team to call for their own ride out of there. But what’s interesting to me is that Boba Fett is still around on the cover to next month’s issue, so I have to wonder how he and the others end up reuniting as T’onga’s quest continues– and how exactly Valance’s memory will be recovered in the long run. In the meantime, though, I had a lot of fun with this issue. There’s some good character interaction and a lot of excitement, though as I mentioned above, some of the action is awkwardly executed. But overall, I’m into this new pairing of Sacks and Medina as a creative team.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunters #36 is available now wherever comic books are sold.