– Spoiler Review –
Grand Moff Adelhard’s dastardly plans and Doctor Aphra’s role in Luke Skywalker’s journey come to light in The Battle of Jakku: Republic Under Siege #2, the middle issue of the entire maxiseries!
It didn’t hit me until I looked at the cover we are now technically halfway through the entire Battle of Jakku, so it got me to thinking about this issue not just in terms of the Republic Under Siege miniseries part, but also its role in setting us towards the second half of the overall story. Thanks to revealing Adelhard’s big plans to mess with the New Republic and showing, though still via telling mostly, how even the Imperial remnant under Gallius Rax’s leadership is concerned about Adelhard’s tactics for their plans on Jakku, the series is developing Adelhard into a potentially worthy threat, and makes the remaining half seem like it has a much bigger hill to climb to defeat him than Luke walking up and being all old-school Jedi again. It also helps Luke move along from artifact fest quests to realizing where he really should be, with his friends, which of course raises all sorts of questions due to Luke’s absence in the Aftermath Trilogy, but if that’s where we’re heading with this, I’m intrigued to see what writer Alex Segura has up his sleeves to weave Luke back in somehow…are we going to see some of “The Starship Graveyard” from Ken Liu’s wonderfully packed The Legends of Luke Skywalker become truth, as it depicts a potential version of him on Jakku? We’ll just have to wait and see and thanks to the current pace of the series, and its releases, it won’t be long!
On the swampy planet where Luke and Rynn Zenat held back the Acolytes of the Beyond from an important artifact, the rogue archaeologist Doctor Aphra has arrived to throw a wrench into Luke’s life, per usual. But whereas it’s normally a detour she’s taking him on, she’s actually the one trying to put him back on the right path, as she not only reveals the artifact he was after is a fake, but how this is all meant to keep him off the real board of Adelhard’s plans. It was nice to see the inversion of their usual relationship, as it hints at the journey Aphra went on in her recent comic series, as I would say this is a little bit of growth for her. Aphra ends up feeling a little underused however, more a conduit for information Luke already knows/was told by Howzell last issue, and even he reiterates in the final pages in a conversation with Rynn, hammering home the point this has all been a distraction. Aphra still gets some fun beats, how she knows about the giant swamp rat chasing them or how the artifact is fake, even calling back to both the Screaming Citadel event and her recent jaunt with Luke in Doctor Aphra (2020), while it was weird yet really cool to think how she’s the bigger cameo, connecting it all together, and not the other way around with Luke.
There’s still a bevy of dialogue telling us how Adelhard has become a bigger threat over the amount of actual showing he has, but at least some of the telling was hidden within the showing. For starters, there’s Lando and Preeti facing off against Adelhard’s Destroyer in a skirmish for unknown reasons, but the way Lando talks up being ready to fold his cards in the battle, so surprised at Adelhard’s methods and rapid expansion, and showing only he and Preeti make it out alive, helps sells us on this development. In Gallius Rax’s Shadow Council event with Imperials like Grand Admiral RAE SLOANE, Grand Moff Randd (first introduced in Lost Stars, later appearing in last two Aftermath books), Grand General Loring (who we met last issue), and Visler Korda (from the Adventures in Wild Space series, but big thanks to an eagle eyed reader, as I didn’t notice him), to name a few, Rax focuses the discussion on the problem Adelhard presents to his, and therefore the Emperor’s plans, at Jakku. To have him be the focus of such a big meeting of important Imperial minds, especially as the culmination of Palpatine’s Contingency plans is nigh, is a way of showing via telling how Adelhard’s new tactics are being noticed by the larger galaxy. And it’s even in Luke’s final talk with Rynn before the issue closes, as he realizes he needs to be with his friends since Adelhard was relying on Luke’s interest in Force-related artifacts to keep him busy, finally putting together what Howzell and Aphra were talking about.
Where it really becomes clear how Adelhard is going to be a big threat, in the most showy way possible, is the revelation one of his plans is to kill incoming New Republic Senators! We first see Adelhard is speaking with the assassin Lan-Drus, who was in Segura’s Return of the Jedi – The Rebellion #1 where he tried to kill Mon Mothma (but she shot him instead), and then we meet a new Kel Dor Senator, who claims they were invited to the New Republic’s government by Leia, though instead of running to her post, she’s running through the woods, being hunted by a Trandoshan, and eventually killed. Adelhard wants to tear apart the New Republic from the inside out, so how about capping its ability to govern at the knees by taking down its potential new leaders and representatives? I mean, they can just find someone new of course, but it wouldn’t look good, and who would want to join, if being a New Republic Senator carries a death mark?! Rax does something similar via brainwashed prisoners, going after Mothma and other leadership, but it hasn’t happened yet in the timeline, it seems. How Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, who should be returning to the fold soon, manage to stop Adelhard’s Senator plan will be interesting to see.
With no backup story, there’s only one art team: Stefano Raffaele, with Alex Sinclair on colors, and Joe Caramagna on letters. The giant swamp rat, which Aphra identifies as a Klyff’wat, is an ugly and unique looking creation, with weird little useless wings at the back of its neck (think a T-Rex’s little hands), the hairless face, so are other random parts of its body, with the bulging eyes and nasty teeth, as well as its literal giant stature make me wish it and the Gorax from the Forest Moon of Endor would have a showdown, mini-kaiju level. Sinclair’s pinkish red for its hairless parts, sickly green eyes, and strangely clean-looking white-blueish fur combine for the ultimate unsettling experience. When Luke stays back to end the threat, though the narration reveals he obviously really doesn’t want to do what he’s about to do, his actions to bring it down seem overly graceful, as one might imagine he’d be, as Raffaele shows a ghost image of his first two strikes, a big wind up, followed by quite the leftover lightsaber slash mark, leading to a final pose where he’s sort of floating peacefully to the ground, though it’s Caramagna’s work around him which shows the real cost of his beautiful seeming work, from the gnarly sound FX for some of the lightsaber slashes, to the screams and shouts out of the creature as Luke’s work takes its toll, something Caramagna guides as through even with the narration promising this was nothing personal. The next page starts out with the swamp rat’s collapse, Sinclair coloring it all black to highlight its passing, only little bits of its eyes and a bunch of its teeth remain to be seen. In scenes with Adelhard, I like how serious Raffaele always makes him seem, which is why Reyna’s more playfulness stands out even more, as she leans on his shoulder or smiles playfully as he warns her physically off him, helping paint her as the real wild card to the whole situation. I noticed in Reyna and earlier Aphra the reuse of faces across panels, and while it wasn’t too glaring, it did stand out, especially with Aphra, someone we’ve had a lot of time with on the comics front, and threw me off time to time. We first physically saw Gallius Rax in Insurgency Rising #2, yet this is the longest he’s been in an issue, and I quite enjoyed what Raffaele and Sinclair did for the character, as he really stood out with the elegant red cape, which seems even more fitting with his whole self-proclaimed status, while the white slivers in his hair make him seem far older than he appears, though the almost vampiric way Raffaele depicted him, with a sort of age-less face and Sinclair’s almost redish-orange choice for his eyes, makes him seem far deadlier than his outfit would make him seem, and I get why people would be off-put or frightened by him.
Here are a few other things:
- The only known next appearance for Aphra is the upcoming A New Legacy one-shot out in January, which will celebrate Marvel’s 10 years of canon comics by focusing on many of its comic-created characters, with stories from Jason Aaron, Kieron Gillen, and Charles Soule!
- Here’s the current release schedule for the remaining Battle of Jakku story: 12/4 Republic Under Siege #3; 12/11 Republic Under Siege #4; 12/25 Last Stand #1; 1/8/2025 Last Stand #2; 1/15/2025 Last Stand #3; 1/22/2025 Last Stand #4.
The Battle of Jakku – Republic Under Siege #2 does a bit more showing amongst its telling, setting us up for what seems to be an uphill battle for our heroes for the remaining half of the maxiseries.
+ Increasing the showing in all its telling
+ Adelhard’s plans certainly seem tricky now…
– Lot of reinforcing what characters already should’ve discerned
Ryan is Mynock Manor’s Head Butler. You can follow him on Twitter @BrushYourTeeth. You can follow the website on Bluesky, Twitter @MynockManor, and Instagram @mynockmanor.
THE BATTLE OF JAKKU MAXISERIES REVIEWS
Insurgency Rising: #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 – Republic Under Siege: #1