Today saw the release of the second issue in Marvel Comics’ adaptation of Lucasfilm’s live-action Disney+ series Star Wars: Ahsoka, and below are my thoughts on this installment.
Ahsoka #2 adapts the episode entitled “Toil and Trouble,” in which the title character– former Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano– investigates an ex-Imperial shipyard on the planet Corellia with the help of New Republic General Hera Syndulla. Meanwhile on Lothal, Sabine Wren convalesces from her lightsaber wound at the hands of Shin Hati and discusses her future with the professor droid Huyang. This episode was released in August of 2023, so it’s been over a full year since I watched it (I keep meaning to revisit the series, but in all honesty I’m waiting for a 4K disc release to do so), and I found this issue to be a nice refresher.
Writer Rodney Barnes has done a good job of compressing Dave Filoni’s script down to the requisite amount of pages, and talented artist Georges Jeanty– along with inker Karl Story and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg– is delivering some attractive illustrations that retain the spirit and tone of the show without being overly faithful to the specific shots and composition of the 16×9 frame. There’s a good energy here, even in the talkier, less action-oriented scenes, and I found myself absorbing expository information even better in the comic than I did in live-action. And when it does come to action, Jeanty and company have staged the battles between good and evil (both on ground and in the skies above Corellia) in a way that keeps things dynamic and exciting. The inherent tension between Hera, Ahsoka, and the shipyard’s management also carries over well from the episode as our heroes strive to uncover the truth about where their allegiances lie.
There’s not a whole lot else to say about a comic issue that absolutely does its job of bringing a familiar installment of Star Wars television to the sequential-art page, but I will remark that while reading this chapter I was thinking that I would much rather have seen a title that filled in the timeline gap between Rebels and Ahsoka for the characters of Tano and Wren. Why revisit something we’ve already seen in a different medium when Barnes could easily have given us new stories that flesh out the larger chronology instead, like he’s doing with the current Inquisitors miniseries? Either way, this is still an entertaining means of revisiting the first season of a series that– as far as we know– will be continuing sometime soon.
Star Wars: Ahsoka #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.