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Star Wars: Knight Errant #3
"AFLAME" PART 3
As with all my “production notes,” consider a “Spoiler Warning” attached. Please read the books first.
By
the midsection of "Aflame," it becomes pretty clear that this isn't the
world Knights of the Old Republic:
it's a realm bereft of joy, outside of the little bits of it that
Gorlan can steal for his family. This issue finds Kerra increasingly
out of control, ping-ponging between the Sith Lords and grasping for
some means of striking back and fulfilling what she sees as her
mission. In #2,
we got to see what life was like under Lord Daiman; in this issue, we
got to see what life was like in a small corner of Odion's domain.
It's no fun to be living here -- and, as yet, no fun to be Kerra. We
get our first overtly comic moment only now, for example, with Gadthree
-- but Kerra isn't in the laugh business. She's still the perpetual
motion machine, set off by the events of #1
(and, even, long before). But she's about to make some important
realizations about herself, and what she's fighting for, that will
change her outlook, introducing a new chord into what we've seen. She
may be more heroic than she thinks she is -- and more forgiving, as
well.
It was no fun to be Luke Skywalker, either, for a good, long stretch of
celluloid -- but that changed as the story went along, and found his
purpose. Kerra, too, is about to find her moment.
Meanwhile, Daiman and Odion's game continues. It'll be interesting to
see how many readers catch what Daiman has actually done here. Daiman
may be a nut, but he's a spectacular gamer -- and thinks several steps
ahead.
Our third issue also found a switch to a new artist, Ivan Rodriguez. I'm
not a stranger to these kinds of things -- my very first comics series
saw an art switch by the third issue -- but as a longtime comics
collector, I guess I'm pretty accustomed to these kinds of changes.
Obviously, you'd like to do everything you can to stay with the same
artist throughout a series, and that's the ideal — but that's not the
norm in monthly comics. Anyway, I very much like Rodriguez's style here!
TRIVIA
- Odion's cruisers are delicious chunks of
gunmetal, spiny and ugly.
I always liked the Sulaco
from Aliens (I even made a Japanese model of it, in my model-airplane
days). While that didn't directly
inspire these, it wouldn't win a beauty contest, either.
- Meanwhile,
Lord Daiman's fighters -- not Aureks, even though they have that feel
-- are spindly things, with no provision for creature comforts. That's
something that comes up in the novel preview, back in #0.
You can order the novel here.
- I
visualized The Spike as something of a helix where the hexagonal
stadium-like factory theaters fitted into it like honeycombs. Most of
the factory floors are open to space above, but the magnetic fields are
opaque, shielding what's inside from prying eyes. And there are plenty
of those!
- Lord Odion's flagship's name recalls Ieldis, an
ancient Sith Lord mentioned in the KOTOR comics. Odion and the other
Sith are a superstitious lot (if not cowardly); knowledge of ancient
evils is the coin of the realm.
- The Givin helmsmen and Verpine
engineers fit with Odion's philosophy of species profiling -- the right
species for the right job. Although, as he admits here, it doesn't
always work. But you file the EEOC complaint against him. I'll just
wait over here...
- Explosive decompression is always tricky to
depict in
comics, and made even more difficult given the varying depictions of it
in movies. It's actually more like as depicted in 2001 than in Total Recall;
no exploding babies, as infamously happened in a 1980s comic book.
Riding a stadium-sized volume of air, we figured a Jedi prepared for
the event, as Kerra was, had a few seconds of action before she blacked
out.
- This issue contained a multiple-page preview of Mass Effect: Evolution, my series launching in January 2011.
