Today saw the release of the debut issue in Marvel Comics’ 12-issue Star Wars: The Battle of Jakku maxi-series, which is also the first issue of the Insurgency Rising four-issue sub-miniseries, if that makes sense. Below are my brief recap and thoughts on this exciting premiere installment.
When The Battle of Jakku was announced as a maxi-series, I became very curious as to how the powers that be at Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Publishing would arrange it to conform with the events of writer Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy of novels, which covered the same time period and culminated in the Battle of Jakku itself. And now that I’ve read the first issue of Alex Segura’s (Star Wars: Poe Dameron – Free Fall) kick-off Insurgency Rising miniseries, I found myself struggling more than I anticipated to make the pieces fit in with Marvel’s 2015 Star Wars: Shattered Empire miniseries and the 2022 novel Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel, both of which chronicle the path of the Rebel (and fledgling New Republic) immediate after the Battle of Endor. However, after consulting with a friend who’s significantly more of a living Star Wars encyclopedia than I am, my understanding is that issue #1 takes place concurrent with Shattered Empire and prior to The Princess and the Scoundrel.
With that confusion out of the way, The Battle of Jakku – Insurgency Rising #1 begins immediately after said battle, but not on Endor– instead we find ourselves in the Anoat sector, where an Imperial Grand Moff named Ubrik Adelhard (who first appeared in the current-canon mobile game Star Wars: Uprising and has been mentioned in a number of other post-Return of the Jedi content, almost as though seeds were being planted for his reemergence here) destroys a squadrons of rebel ships from his star destroyer. Only then do we cut to the forest moon of Endor, where Han Solo bids a temporary farewell to Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker as he goes off to “clean up some Imperial dregs.” Then when night falls on the home of the Ewoks, Leia visits the smoldering funeral pyre of her father Darth Vader (formerly the Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, of course) to vent her frustrations and say goodbye. Next we’re on the planet Devaron, where the dark-side cult known as the Acolytes of the Beyond (first seen in Aftermath) meet with an Anzati woman named Reyna Oskure (newly introduced here) who is instructed to help the Imperial remnant eliminate the would-be founders of the New Republic before it can get off the ground.
Back on Endor, Luke and Leia are surprised to be contacted by a survivor of the attack from the beginning of the story– a B-wing pilot named Rynn Zenat (another new character), who has no memory of how she got to Endor from Anoat. She warns the twin siblings that even though Emperor Palpatine is dead, their struggles against the remnant are about to get a whole lot worse thanks to Adelhard. That’s where we get our “To be continued” here, but there’s also a secondary tale that gives us Adelhard’s backstory, rising from indentured servitude to Imperial stormtrooper to officer through the Galactic Civil War. We learned how he served under, and came to idolize, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Darth Vader– and the issue ends with a flashback meeting between Adelhard and the black-armored Dark Lord of the Sith. It’s clear by this point that this fearsome villain’s allegiance to the Empire is steadfastly loyal, and that he will prove a formidable enemy to our heroes, once they finally do confront him.
In the meantime, I’d say Segura and his artists (Leonard Kirk from Star Wars: Han Solo – Imperial Cadet and Stefano Raffaele from Star Wars: Darth Maul – Black, White & Red in this issue) have already done a bang-up job in carrying over Marvel’s titles from A Galaxy Far, Far Away into this new era after the ending of Return of the Jedi. I do now feel the need to go back and reread Shattered Empire– and maybe just the beginning of The Princess and the Scoundrel– to better make sense of the sequence of events in my head, but ultimately that doesn’t really matter. What I’m excited about here is how the lives and personalities of Luke, Leia, and Han are shaped by these new turns of events… and by their conflict against a fresh, heretofore underexplored enemy.
Star Wars: The Battle of Jakku – Insurgency Rising #1 is available now wherever comic books are sold.