a selection of reviews from our database
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Star Wars: Legacy #1 Book Released: 21 June 2006 Writer: John Ostrander
Reviewed by Adam White |
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I’m a huge Star Wars fanatic, and I’m well-versed in the many facets of the universe and its various licensed products. So I go into reading Star Wars: Legacy #1 with high hopes yet low expectations, as Dark Horse’s line of Star Wars comicbooks has slowly went downhill after their magnificent Rogue Squadron series ended. Sure, there have been highlights in places, most notably the creation of durable characters like Aayla Secura and Quinlan Vos, but the line has been largely diluted as Lucasfilm has dictated more and more limitations because of their renewed production of material. Left to their own devices, Dark Horse puts out quality Star Wars comicbooks (especially Ostrander and Duursema); but the more their hands are tied the less interesting the stories become. Legacy starts out somewhere in the middle, showing promise through the constrictions placed on the storytellers.
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Ostrander and Duursema move things 130 years after the Battle of Yavin in order to regain some control over the characters they write. |
John Ostrander is a heck of a writer, crafting the best non-Rogue Squadron stories put out by Dark Horse. Ostrander slyly got around story constraints by creating his own set of characters to play with in the Star Wars sandbox, which worked wonderfully until Lucasfilm took a liking to those characters and sent everyone back to square one. Ostrander, now officially partnered up with Duursema, try to capture lightning twice by moving things 130 years after the Battle of Yavin in order to regain some control over the characters they write. On the one hand, Ostrander and Duursema come up with interesting descendants of all our favorite characters, yet the overall plot seems to be more of the same old, same old: Empire rises again, Sith rise again, good guys become rebels again. Granted, they had a lot to cover in this first issue to introduce the time period, so I think that whether or not the series succeeds largely rests on how compelling the characters are, and I think Ostrander and Duursema have some potentially exciting characters here. I trust this writing team and have faith that they will set the right course for Legacy, but always in motion, the future is.
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Duursema’s characters have great physical looks and mastery of movement, yet she keeps them grounded in the gritty realism so essential to the Star Wars Universe. |
Jan Duursema has proven herself the quintessential Star Wars artist, designing some of the most engrossing characters in the Expanded Universe. Duursema’s characters have great physical looks and mastery of movement, yet she keeps them grounded in the gritty realism so essential to the Star Wars Universe. Duursema not only gets the looks of the existing aliens and characters right but also fleshes out new characters and creatures without being overly derivative, a trap into which many a Star Wars hopeful has fallen. Exciting action, tense emotion, expansive settings — all hallmarks of Duursema’s Star Wars tales.
So why only 3 Stars? Well, I think Legacy has tons of potential, but I just felt #1 was missing something that I can’t quite put my finger on. I will be picking up at least the next few issues to see where it goes, because chances are good this could end up being a 5-Star series. Definitely worth a try for all you Star Wars fans out there, and a good starting place for anyone who would like to try out Dark Horse’s Star Wars offerings.
One last question, though: Who in the world is the Twi’lek Sith on the cover and in all the promotional stuff? Because she doesn’t appear in the comic. Just curious.