Darth Maul – Black, White & Red #1
“GHOST SHIP”
Before the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader.
Darth Sidious trained another disciple in the secrets of the Sith Order.
This apprentice was a mysterious warrior of Dathomir, who left a path of death and destruction as he made his way through the galaxy….
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Stefano Raffaele
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Colorist: Raul Angulo
Cover artist: Alex Maleev
Editor: Mark Paniccia
Publication date: April 24 2024
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, what better time could there be to see Darth Maul return, and that’s exactly what happens in the latest mini series Darth Maul – Black, White & Red as we head to the pre-Episode I era (a place we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the coming months) and Maul and his master Darth Sidious. A prisoner transport has gone missing, a mystery of the Sith that sees Palpatine task Maul with tracking down the ship and finding out exactly what’s happened. A holo recording shows a horrifying, slender figure and the audio rings out with tortured screams. Unnerving to many, but Maul is eager to serve his master and heads out to the transport in his Sith Infiltrator the Scimitar.
We learn the prisoners are enemies of the Sith, from an order known as the Final Occultation who plan to expose the Siths plans and stop them, something that after so much careful planning and preparation Palpatine must stop. Maul lands and departs the Scimitar, and instantly he is disorientated, reality folding away. Unconscious, he wakes to see the Scimitar blown out of the hangar, and realises that he will soon follow so composing himself he uses his tumbling lightsaber hilt to hit a panel and reactivate the shield before initiating a signal that will send his ship to a nearby world to await his return.
The transport has the stench of death, and as he moves forward through the carnage he finds a survivor who panicked tells Maul that ‘she’s’ in his head, and when Maul asks who we see Heldi, a tentacled, hovering nightmare with an exposed brain where her skull should be. The man tells Maul she’s in all of their heads, and clearing his mind to focus on order he hurls his saber and slices her cleaves in half from ‘head’ to ‘toe’ before leaving the man behind and moving on into the detention block. There he notes that the bodies are different, broken and twisted and we see a figure slam into the glass of a cell, a man hiding from the attack which starts raining down on Maul. It’s Vasik, another of the Final Occultation leaders and Maul initially deflects his laser blasts with ease before moving in and finding the huge creature is far swifter than he looks. Vasik opens the cell, pulling the man out and hurling him at Maul, who simply slices the guard in half as Vasik leaps in and grabs Maul. However, Vasik doesn’t account for Mauls mastery and as he holds the Sith aloft his double-sided blade slices his arms off before Maul ends him.
Maul follows the screams down another corridor to a huge open room where hundreds are congregated and appear to be screaming in a unison of pain. He watches, and from the writing crowd he sees a vision of himself, inviting him to join, and watches as the face peels away to a skull. He despatches it, and learns what the Final Occultation really want; anarchy over order, and it explains that the hypermatter particles within the ship won’t take it to hyperspace but will instead open a rift, casting the galaxy into a ‘red, boiling planet‘. The entity orders its followers to kill Maul, and while he is more than capable of slicing them to pieces instead he leaves, seals them in, heads to the cockpit and steers the ship towards the ice planet where his own vessel awaits. Opening a hole in the glass he leaps out as the ship smashes into the ground and contacts his master, telling him he believes they should never have been taken prisoner but destroyed. The whole galaxy almost fell, and as we end the first issue he tells his master that the chaos they shared with him will remain on the ice world.
A fascinating first issue, this is very much in the haunted castle mode of Cavan Scotts runs on Vader’s Castle and the later Halloween releases, and as such builds its own sombre mood. It’s also interesting to consider that here, Maul is our hero. He ends the threat of a power even more dangerous than the Sith. While Sidious craves power and control, the Final Occultation would threaten every single being in the galaxy, so to watch Maul make such a stand for the Sith and in turn save everyone casts him in the hero role. It’s like watching Venom enter the Spider-Man mythos as the enemy and slowly watch him become the anti-hero so many modern readers know, and while we know Maul’s short term destiny (similar to the poor guard Vasik hurls as him) and his ultimate end at the blade of Obi-Wan Kenobi, it definitely adds an interesting new wrinkle as even he questions his masters methods. He’s certainly questioned it before, but as Darth Vader often wonders just how dark his master can go, it only underlines the pure, dripping evil of Palpatine and how his illustrious servants of the dark side were never as ruthless as he was.
Great art from Steffano Raffaelle illustrating a dark adventure by writer Benjamin Percy, it’s good to see the spirit of the early 80’s Marvel UK back up strips still survives in the modern era. The galaxy may be vast, but those dark places where evils dwell is as terrible and Lovecraftian as ever.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Percy, Benjamin (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 33 Pages - 04/24/2024 (Publication Date) - Marvel (Publisher)
