Yesterday saw the release of issue #9 in Dark Horse Comics’ all-ages anthology title Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
Jedi Master Quinlan Vos is a cult-favorite Star Wars character that I actually know very little about, despite having encountered him in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series, the Star Wars: Brotherhood novel by Mike Chen, and a couple other stories here and there through the years. That’s why it’s so cool to me that Quinlan gets an entire issue dedicated to one of his adventures in Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories #9 from Dark Horse Comics. This story begins in the Bavana system, where a nervous fellow is accosted by bounty hunters in a dive bar. From out of nowhere, Quinlan intervenes with his lightsaber, rescuing the man and making an egress toward the town’s spaceport. But they soon find their path blocked by Cad Bane (another cult-favorite character, who showed up recently in the live-action Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett), and most of the remainder of this issue is a big battle sequence between the Jedi Master and the cowboy-hatted bounty hunter. The wild card here is the criminal element of Bavana, members of which overhear conversations about Count Dooku’s treasure that this man– named Grayson Eckt– stole from his former employer.
There’s a big climax in a junkyard, with Quinlan eventually getting the upper hand on both Cad Bane and the assorted criminals, but the really intriguing moment in this comic is when Vos finds a stuffed Wookiee doll in the ship that helps he and Eckt make their escape. This beat clued me in to the fact that this doll has appeared in just about every issue of Hyperspace Stories (Wookieepedia says there’s one arguable exception), tying all these stories and characters together from different periods in the Star Wars timeline. I just think that’s such a neat idea, and I can’t wait to see if and how it pays off further on down the line. In the meantime, I got a really big kick out of this issue, especially the banter between Cad Bane and Quinlan Vos, with the latter getting in some good digs at his playfully prickly relationship with fellow Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. Writer Michael Moreci is doing an excellent job of making this title exciting, and I’m loving the heavily stylized art by the talented Nick Brokenshire with colorist David Kennedy. Since it debuted a little over a year ago, Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories has gone from a title that I kind of dreaded reading to one of my favorite comics in the current Star Wars canon, so I must commend Dark Horse on a great job improving the work.
Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories #9 is available now wherever comic books are sold.