Comic Review – “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” #1 Is a Refreshing Change of Pace for Marvel’s Lucasfilm Adaptations
Today, at long last, saw the release of the first issue in Marvel Comics’ adaptation of Lucasfilm’s 2019 theatrical film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (delayed from its originally scheduled publication in 2020) and below are my thoughts on this debut installment.
I’ve complained a lot over the past few years about how bored I am with Marvel’s Star Wars adaptations slavishly recreating the movie or Disney+ series they’re based on, so it pleases me in no small amount to report that writer Jody Houser (Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi) and artist Will Sliney (Solo: A Star Wars Story) have taken an appreciably different approach this time around. To be specific, it seems that Lucasfilm has actually granted this creative team some artistic license to both add and remove content from the text of the film where they saw fit. The first example that jumped out to me was the omission of the Eye of Webbish bog deleted scene from the opening on the lava planet Mustafar (that was represented in The Rise of Skywalker - Expanded Edition novelization of the movie), but that wasn’t too surprising… maybe just a little disappointing. But next I realized that House and Sliney had also “skipped" right over the hyperspace-skipping action sequence in the Millennium Falcon.
I’m guessing that this particular omission was done to make room for some actual new content, like a brief story beat we get between General Leia Organa and Resistance maintenance worker Rose Tico which explains why Rose didn’t join Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, Chewbacca, and BB-8 on their mission to Pasaana. Some of the clunkier dialogue between Rey and Leia is still here, though in the movie that was necessitated by the use of existing footage of late actress Carrie Fisher. Here it would have been nice of Houser to tweak some of those lines to make them feel less like non-sequiturs. But all of that is made far more forgivable by Will Sliney’s incredibly gorgeous art (accentuated by the vibrant work of colorist Guru-eFX), which goes so much further than simply copying still frames from the source material like some other comic artists I won’t mention here. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Sliney this morning, and when that goes up you can read about his approach to using mirror images as a device for this project.
Moving onward, the other major thing that the creative collaborators have added to this adaptation is mindscreen inner monologue and single-panel flashbacks to scenes that weren’t in the movie at all, such as Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian’s investigation into Ochi of Bestoon and Lando’s “peaceful" seclusion on Pasaana teaching the natives Sabacc. And even when this comic comes closer to a one-to-one representation of the events of the film, such as in the sinking fields and Vexis sequences, Sliney takes some very innovative strategies in conveying these moments through sequential art. Needless to say by this point, I was very pleasantly surprised with the inventiveness I encountered in these pages (there are even some fun references to Marvel’s Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren miniseries from 2019, also illustrated by Sliney) and I hope that future comic adaptations of Lucasfilm media follow suit accordingly. Looking forward to the remaining four issues– it’s definitely been worth the wait so far!
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker #1 is available now wherever comic books are sold.