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Star Wars: Knight Errant — Escape #3

"ESCAPE" PART 3

As with all my “production notes,” consider a “Spoiler Warning” attached. Please read the books first.

In the Knight Errant novel, we had established the familial relationship that existed between Daiman, Odion, and some of the other Sith Lords in the sector; here, we see more of that relationship on the page. Xelian the Destroyer was one of several of the dowager Vilia's children; we learn more about her in the novel, but this is the first time that we have seen her depicted visually.

It had always been my intention to tell with Odion a similar kind of story to the one I had told in the novel with the siblings Quillan and Dromika. Whereas the Jedi take steps to help students deal with their Force powers, the self-obsessed Sith would not necessarily pay as much attention to the needs of their young. In the case of Odion, we see what happens when the Force itself becomes a source of pain for someone. It's an interesting question whether he might have received help from the others had he asked for it -- but he didn't. And the galaxy is worse off for it.

One of the challenges with writing a series about a loner isthat there isn't anybody for Kerra to speak her mind to in many situations. She could tell us what she was thinking in Escape #2, because we had Zoojoo there -- but she's alone in several other situations in Escape. All along in the series, we've established that the role of the narrator is an impartial one, setting the scene: most of the other internal narration that we get comes from the Sith. So there are moments like the scene where Kerra's climbing down the ladder, where in the past we'd have used thought balloons -- but they no longer really exist in most comics. In retrospect, I might have gone with the departure from style and used the internal narration after all -- there's a reason we don't see characters talking to themselves much.

The scene with the children in their isolation bubbles hits us as a surprise, and it explains much about how Odion is able to run his empire. Here, the artist made the choice to show only a single child in detail, with the other bubbles being mostly opaque, giving us shady figures at most inside; the thinking being that if you could see a whole lot of children here it would look like a relatively less lonely place. (In fact, of course, none of the children can see each other.) Part of the inspiration for the cloister were the Romanian orphanages discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where infants were more or less raised in isolation and away from human contact. It seemed the most miserable situation we could depict, and a worthy one for Kerra to want to end.

TRIVIA

• Daiman's eyes, creepy as they are, we see here right away in his birth scene.

• This is also the first appearance of the dowager Vilia.

• Yulan's backstory with his children was told in the novel, and we now see how it is that he has been able to go on without them. Here, he describes handing off his command to Rusher, who later helps Kerra. One of the fun things about this issue is that Kerra meets both the master and the student without ever knowing about their connection!

• We needed to establish the cargo elevator because of what we see later in the series; there had to have been a easier way in and out of the Cloister than what Kerra took!

• The mesa on Skarpos, of course, looks much like Devil's Tower in Wyoming, the setting for the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• Here we see Glenk was indeed the traitor that Daiman had in Odion's company.

• We realize here that Yulan was at Gazzari in the novel, evidently serving with the troops that were being fired upon by his former student, Rusher. It's a small sector after all!