Comic Review - Kylo Ren and General Hux Set Their Sights On Naboo in "Star Wars: Legacy of Vader" #4
Today saw the release of the fourth issue in Marvel Comics’ ongoing series Star Wars: Legacy of Vader, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
Legacy of Vader #4 begins on the First Order’s current flagship the Finalizer (as this comic is set in the wake of the destruction of Snoke’s Supremacy at the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi) with Kylo Ren asking General Hux if their fleet still has enough firepower to destroy an entire planet. Long story short, Hux gives the affirmative, and writer Charles Soule then flashes back to two days earlier, when Ren and Darth Vader’s former attendant Vaneé are taking a tour of Kylo’s grandmother Padmé Amidala’s now-abandoned royal palace, which Ren first assumes once belonged to Senator-turned-Emperor Sheev Palpatine. Vaneé continues his history lesson about Naboo (which includes a fun nod to The High Republic), insisting that the lesson is for Ren to find something around which to center himself. And after Kylo berates the disembodied attendant for wasting his time, they are approached by two locals who warn them not to hang around the “cursed" palace.
We get a really neat, hyper-stylized synopsis of Vader’s return to Naboo in the writer Greg Pak’s 2020 run on the Star Wars: Darth Vader comic, which led the locals to believe they would be executed for even remembering that Padmé existed. Then the four individuals are confronted by an aristocratic enforcer by the name of Storg Veruna, who insists that the dilapidated palace is now the property of the Veruna family and that they are openly trespassing. Naturally Kylo Ren is able to easily mop the floor with these toughs, but once manages to escape alive and that sends the other two locals into a panic. Ren kills them with a Force choke, tells Vaneé that he was wrong about the lesson to be learned from Anakin and Padmé’s relationship, and declares he’s going to teach the entirety of Naboo a lesson once and for all.
Back in the bookend “present" of the story, Kylo asks Hux if his throne has been completed (“It remains in progress.") and then transmits a message back down to the surface of Naboo, crowning himself the new king of the once-prosperous planet. I thought this was another great issue of Legacy of Vader, buoyed by both Soule’s top-notch writing and the art by extremely talented illustrator Stefano Raffaele with colorist Nolan Woodard. I’m absolutely loving Kylo Ren’s ongoing tour of his grandfather’s past, though I doubt he’ll actually learn any of the real lessons being handed to him by Vaneé, who probably still doesn’t have Ren’s best interests at heart anyway. I feel like we don’t have a ton of information about what becomes of Naboo after this point in the larger timeline, so it’s pretty intriguing to know that just about anything is possible as this comic continues into the foreseeable future.
Star Wars: Legacy of Vader #4 is available now wherever comic books are sold.