Today saw the release of issue #47 in Volume III of Star Wars: Darth Vader from Marvel Comics, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
Darth Vader #47 begins on the Sith planet of Exegol, where the titular Dark Lord has raided Emperor Palpatine’s vaults and stolen an enormous Kyber crystal, much like the one that was used to power the first Death Star. Lieutenant Pryde praises Vader for his accomplishments, but other members of the Schism Imperial (like Governor Tauntaza and Sub-Administrator Sly Moore) are more tempered with their optimism. Because even as the crew makes their escape, they are pursued by members of the Sith Eternal cult, who have called down the colossal Lovecraftian beasts known as the Summa-Verminoth, which exist in the treacherous space surrounding Exegol. The forensics droid ZED-6-7 also offers to kill the remaining members of the M.A.R. Corps, whose cybernetic implants have stopped responding to Imperial commands, thus making them useless to the Schism. Vader says to leave them to the summa-verminoth and then communes with the Kyber crystal inside the Imperial shuttle.
He sees a vision of Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious), who seems to forgive Vader for his crimes against him, knowing that it is a Sith Lord’s true nature to seek “any and all power” available to them. Then Palpatine gives Vader permission to go after his son Luke Skywalker, and writer Greg Pak cuts to the Rebel Fleet on the other side of the galaxy, where Luke apparently senses Vader’s continued accumulation of power. Luke tells Princess Leia that he needs to leave the fleet for a while “just to be safe,” and Leia provides him with a holographic message she received from the thief Warba Calip, who says she has something the would-be Jedi might be interested in. Luke suspects it might be a trap or a scam, but takes off anyway. Meanwhile back on Exegol, Vader cuts a chunk out of the Kyber crystal using his lightsaber and crafts it into a weapon that he uses to break through the summa-verminoth barricade of the planet while riding atop the cockpit of his shuttle. This scene plays out through a sequence of splash pages that bring this issue to an early climax, but there are is still one final, significantly quieter, scene left to go.
We see Luke meeting with Warba on an unnamed snow planet, and he outright asks her if she has set a trap for him while she’s standing in front of a Naboo starship. Then she reveals Sabé, who tells Luke she knows his father and then shoots Warba unconscious with a stun blast, following through by disabling Luke’s droid R2-D2. The final page leaves us on a cliffhanger with Sabé telling Luke that it’s time to show his dark side, and the cover of the next issue implies that these characters will be facing off against Darth Vader before too long. It’s a pretty exciting chapter in the Darth Vader title, and you can definitely tell that Pak is building toward something big (likely culminating in the upcoming 50th and final issue of this run, as I’ve predicted in the past). But the great thing about all of this is that he and artist Raffaele Ienco have really been bringing their A-game as the title winds down, and with just three issues– in all probability– left to go, I’d say readers have a lot of excitement to look forward to in this concluding arc as the storyline approaches the events of Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: Darth Vader #47 is available now wherever comic books are sold.