Today saw the release of the fourth and final issue of Marvel Comics’ current Star Wars: Jango Fett miniseries, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this climactic installment.
Jango Fett #4 begins on Ord Mantell, where a HoloNet News crew broadcasts current-event stories from around the galaxy. Suddenly the titular bounty hunter breaks into the station along with his cohorts Aurra Sing and Nakano Lash, who demand to see any and all footage from the recent heist of the Hope of Glee Anselm statue. While watching the footage, Lash realizes that it must have been the Nautolan Ambassador Fiarok who set up Nakano’s crew to take the fall for the crime, switching out the statue with a fake. So Jango and Aurra take an RX-series camera droid from the HoloNet station and leave Lash to her own devices instead of turning her in, inspiring her to go on to become a bounty hunter (as we see in writer Ethan Sacks’ other series Star Wars: Bounty Hunters, which is set later on in the timeline). Then they travel toward the planet Jaloria aboard the Slave I, while having a fairly on-the-nose discussion about whether or not Fett is ready to become a father (this comic is set just before the beginning of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, so young clone Boba has not been “born” yet).
On Jaloria, Fett and Sing face off against a group of dangerous bounty hunters that have been hunting them, including the Trandoshan Cradossk (father of Bossk, speaking of Star Wars daddies) and the relentlessly aggressive cyborg Vigor Struk. There’s a multi-page battle sequence that’s a lot of fun, but naturally our antiheroes are ultimately capable of handling their foes, and from there they make their way to the Republic’s regional headquarters. There, they confront Fiarok with an accusation pre-recorded by Nakano Lash, and the Nautolan is taken into custody, with RX-56 broadcasting the news out to the rest of the galaxy. Unfortunately this betrayal means that peace talks between the Nautolans and the Anselmi break down and war continues on Glee Anselm, but in an epilogue wee see that the villainous Count Dooku is quite pleased by this turn of events, as it means the Republic government will be further destabilized and Chancellor Vallorum’s competence as a leader called into question– we’ll see this notion followed up on in Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Dooku is also impressed by the work of Jango Fett, and makes a mental note to call upon the bounty hunter's services once again, which we know happens by the events of Attack of the Clones. So Sacks is doing a lot of work to set up things that have already happened in the larger Star Wars canon, but what’s really important is that this comic was plenty entertaining during that journey. There were a few moments of somewhat eye-rolling obviousness– kind of like the several moments of unnecessary exposition in Solo: A Star Wars Story– but otherwise I had a lot of fun with this miniseries, and I actually kind of wish we had gotten a better explanation of what Aurra Sing is doing on Tatooine during the Boonta Eve podrace. Instead her future after this story is left open-ended, like Jango’s, except we know they both die later on at the hands of Tobias Beckett and Mace Windu, respectively. This issue concludes with a “The end… for now….” caption, so maybe Marvel Comics will give us more adventures with these bounty-hunter characters sometime in the (hopefully not-too-distant) future. I’d certainly like to see it happen, and I’d say Ethan Sacks should be involved if it does.
Star Wars: Jango Fett #4 is available now wherever comic books are sold.