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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #43
"THE REAPING" PART 1
As with all my “production notes,” consider a “Spoiler Warning” attached. Please read the books first.
Back
in high school, I was seriously entertaining a career in some kind of
space-related field -- astrophysics, aeronautical engineering,
something along those lines. I'd bought a telescope just in time for
the arrival of Halley's Comet -- dragging it out evenings and fighting
against the light pollution from the city.
What I found out was that, when it comes to astronomy, my mind isn't
designed the way it needs to be to locate things. Going from star maps
to the sky often involved some kind of transposition — and then if I
had the wrong lens on, everything was transposed yet again. I could
never find anything. Then the Challenger exploded and Halley's Comet
turned out to be a big zero -- meaning that by the time I got to
college, that ambition had basically played out. Nearly flunking
calculus was the final straw, sending me across campus to the
journalism school.
A decade later, we'd had Comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake pay a call --
and I gave it another try with a new, better telescope. The result was
pretty much the same -- and the telescope headed for its date with a
garage sale. But I did get one thing out of it -- as a subscriber to
Astronomy magazine, I won a drawing for a T-shirt for the comet movie Deep Impact.
Insert you own "I sought after the universe and all I got was this
lousy T-shirt" joke here!
The movie itself is no masterpiece (though it's loads better than Armageddon,
out around the same time) but they did get expert advice on what
conditions might exist on a comet. Done today, they'd know more --
thanks to a real-life probe named (perhaps not coincidentally) Deep
Impact, which struck a comet with an impactor and observed the results.
It's clear that comets are interesting, volatile environments -- and
while I'd included a comet in an issue of Iron Man,
I really wanted to set an adventure on one at some point.
Thus the dust-divers of "The Reaping" were born, illustrating yet one
more circumstance in which living slaves might be seen as superior to
droids. Combine low gravity with the porous surface of a warming comet
waiting to erupt, and you've got fun waiting to happen. Hit another
plan of Zayne's with a serious hitch -- the number of people to be
saved -- and the fun keeps on rolling.
Bong Dazo really delivered, providing really cool visuals for some
challenging sequences.
TRIVIA
- My original idea for the title had been "Cold
Harvest," but Dark Times
was already doing "Blue Harvest." This one works just as well.
- It
occured to me that the thorilide crystals would need to be tiny and
fragile, easily ruined by a change in state of the surrounding material
-- otherwise there'd be no reason not to simply destroy the comet and
filter the remains. Likewise, the crevices created during sunward
heating made for a good reason to catch the comets in their orbits,
rather than rerouting them to some holding area where they could be
picked clean at the miners' leisure. This way, nature opens the comet
for them.
- Qohn is a Nazzar, a sort of horse-faced critter
from the Ultimate Alien
Anthology.
- The "high-end customer" reference takes us back
to "Dueling Ambitions."
- I
haven't counted the number of divers in the Ready Room and leaving the
surface of the comet, but it's pretty close to the actual number.
Bong's inclusion of the child slave being helped into his/her suit was
a really nice touch!
- I imagined the double-page spread as being
a companion piece, in a round-about way, of the spread on the Rogue
Moon in #3. I'll
leave the thematic implications to the reader to
interpret, but it's really fun looking at them together!
- Finally... the Gladiator has been seen before.
Where? Next time...!
