Comic Review - Our Heroes Face a Nightmare Over Eriadu in "Star Wars" The High Republic - Fear of the Jedi" #4
Today saw the release of the fourth issue in Marvel Comics’ miniseries Star Wars: The High Republic - Fear of the Jedi, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this penultimate installment.
The High Republic - Fear of the Jedi #4 begins aboard the Republic Longbeam cruiser Gios, where Marshal Keeve Trennis is stunned by the sudden appearance of never-before-seen enormous, winged versions of the Force-eating Nameless creatures out in space. In neighboring ships, Lourna Dee and Sskeer are similarly shocked, and the latter of those two almost seems ready to give up for good. But after the Nameless tears open the hull of the Gios, Keeve uses the Force (simultaneously wondering why she’s able to do that if a huge Nameless is just outside) to halt the danger of decompression in the vessel’s hull, while the other crew members scramble to raise a containment field. Out in space, Jedi Knight Ai-dan Yelooc and Masters Sskeer and Orbalin attempt to combat the Nameless with their Vector starfighters, though another divided part of Orbalin’s gelatinous form is soon killed by one of the creatures.
Sskeer orders Yelooc to bring what remains of Orbalin’s incapacitated form back to the Gios, but Ai-dan is overcome with fear by the Nameless. Speaking of which, in her ship Lourna Dee insists that she doesn’t see any creatures at all out in space, instead having spotted Marchion Ro’s flagship the Gaze Electric as the cause of the Gios’s near-destruction. Back in his quarters, Tey Sirrek continues his confrontation with his deceased husband– ex-Jedi Vildar Mac– though all of these protagonists quickly begin to realize that their foes are not quite what they seem. After putting the pieces together they deduce that Child of the Storm H’Tar– “shackled in an engine of her own design– is actually who is behind this attack, and that the being ripping apart the ship are in reality a swarm of scav droids.
And yes, one of the scav droids does turn out to be roughly the size of a Purrgil, like the enormous Nameless some of the Jedi thought they were seeing, so the question becomes: “How do they still deal with this very real menace in time to help the other Jedi and Republic forces engaged in the ground battle down on the surface of Eriadu?" It’s a pretty exciting issue, even though a big part of the threat turns out to be imaginary– it was cool that Tey ultimately saw the mirage as a way to deal with his own unresolved trauma from the loss of Vildar decades earlier. Writer Cavan Scott and artist Marika Cresta (with colorist Jim Campbell) continue to do a bang-up job with these High Republic comics, and with just one issue left to go in this miniseries– plus a wrap-up finale one-shot the month after that– I’m very curious to see how this creative team ties everything together in a nice tidy bow, in conjunction with the other climatic High Republic novels and comics coming out around the same time this summer. I’m also very much hoping that Orbalin is okay, even in his reduced form.
Star Wars: The High Republic - Fear of the Jedi #4 is available now wherever comic books are sold.