Star Wars: Phantom Menace 25th Anniversary Special #1
THE PHANTOM MENACE ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL
A mother and son, enslaved on a desert planet…
…two Jedi and a Queen in need…
…a galaxy on the brink of chaos…
…and one boy about to discover his destiny…
…and all the sacrifice it will demand.
Writer: Greg Pak
Artist: Will Sliney
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Colorist: Guru-eFX
Cover artist: Phil Noto
Editor: Mark Paniccia
Release Date: May 1, 2024
Star Wars always has good stuff when May the 4th comes round. This year we had a new The Acolyte trailer, plenty of new toys, a new batch of six Tales of the Empire episodes, and this comic. It’s also the 20th anniversary of The Phantom Menace in theaters, and people have all sorts of good will towards it as it now veers towards nostalgia.
The comic kicks off with a sequence on Tatooine where slavers are loading slaves onto a slow ship to the Zygerrian Work Colonies. Two of these slaves are Anakin’s mom Shmi and that old lady whose bones are a meteorological barometer. Suddenly, a fiery blade severs one of the slaver’s weapons in two. It’s Anakin Skywalker, or rather how he sees himself as an adult. The lightsaber with its unusual hilt design is also on fire! Very Biblical for a boy who was literally a virgin birth, a fiery sword like what an angel would have, but I suppose Anakin had never seen a real lightsaber or Jedi before Qui-Gon Jinn came to his planet. The scene goes to young Annie waking up and telling his mom his dream. Shmi tells him not to be too good for his own good, something one would never say to Darth Vader.
One thing I love about these opening pages is it’s right out of The Phantom Menace audio book. I remember listening to the tapes and hearing Anakin dreaming about being a Jedi and freeing his mom. I also think back to a line I THOUGHT I heard during Revenge of the Sith: “The boy who dreamed, no more.” It was actually “The boy you trained…” but my subconscious mind put the two together and came up with a cooler line than the one that was in that movie.
Then, a sarcastic chicken droid waltzes in (it’s the same type of droid that was in The Book of Boba Fett) and orders slave Annie to pick something up at the Spaceport and threatens to kill him with the anti-slave bomb in his body. Annie goes to the spaceport and sees the same slavers in his dream (I guess he sees them around all the time and puts them in the same role in his dreams) harass a newly-captured Tusken slave with the same fate the chicken droid threatened him with. Anakin then makes their nifty green landspeeder take off with a driver and the slavers chase after it. The Tusken runs away and Anakin makes out like he has no idea what’s going on. The kid goes back to bed after a long day.
Then, the events of Menace come to pass with the Pod Race and winning his freedom. We see Kitster and Wald briefly woo-hooing and never see them again until Sabe reintroduces them in the recent run of the Darth Vader title. The dialogue between Anakin and his mom take place as usual, but the subsequent splash page looks different: in the movie, Anakin appears to be stoic but the art by Will Sliney shows Annie with an upset look on his face, like a 10-year-old leaving his mom behind forever.
Anakin goes before the Jedi Council and has a brief talk with Jar-Jar Binks about being good people. Anakin then hears Obi-Wan discuss how dangerous he believes Anakin is and is promised by Qui-Gon to train him. Obi-Wan looks pissed! The Battle of Naboo takes place with Darth Maul dueling the Jedi and Annie blowing up the droid ship, while on the next splash page Obi-Wan cradles the body of his master. We finally see the emotion that Anakin must have felt when he hears Qui-Gon had died. He had just heard Obi-Wan say how dangerous he believes he is, but now Obi is promising to train him as he had made a promise to his dying master that he would do so.
We see Anakin getting introduced to Senator Palpatine, but Anakin has a strange look on his face, remembering all the hard stuff people said to him the past few days – sacrifice, discipline and the memory of his mother.
To me, the art tells so many diffenrt things than what I saw in the movie. In the Prequels, I always thought Mace Windu was Anakin’s “enemy”; not believing in him, openly distrusting and hostile to arguably the greatest Jedi Knight the Order ever produced. However, the art shows Ki-Adi Mundi being distrusting and hostile to Annie. The look on his face, four separate times in four separate panels across 2 pages, shows Mundi is not on board with training Anakin as a Jedi. It kinda blows my mind.
Another panel shows Dream Anakin with tattered robes (something he didn’t have in the previous dream sequence) and flaming lightsaber of justice. It also shows two dead slavers (although you only see the face of one, the other body is a lump of fabric – maybe Shmi?) and dream Anakin saying “You’re free.” Then Obi-Wan tells Anakin he believes in him.
Back on Tatooine, Shmi tries to adjust to life without Anakin and is understandably sad. Bones Lady and a still-naked Threepio try to give words of encouragement, and then a knock on the door. It’s the same Tusken as before, giving Shmi a Black Melon water fruit from The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian and tells the story (off-screen) of how Anakin freed him, despite the danger to himself. I can only think of how ten years later, Anakin would slaughter Sand People because they killed his mother. Was this one of the Tuskens Anakin killed? Hell, even Vader still has feelings about it, killing more Tuskens when he came to Tatooine in the comics. The novel Tatooine Ghost showed how the Tuskens still remember the man with a laser sword killing an entire tribe of Tuskens single-handedly. Shmi is now more positive knowing Anakin will return. The final splash page is not the dream-self Anakin had with fiery sword, dead slavers and battle-tattered cloak. It’s Anakin and Obi-Wan at their most heroic during the Clone Wars, posing on Tatooine. Shmi has a new hope.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the comic, given how The Phantom Menace is now 25 years old and seemingly with no more stories left to tell. I’m glad I was wrong. This comic tied in Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope with a little of The Empire Strikes Back dashed in for good measure.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Pak, Greg (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 32 Pages - 05/01/2024 (Publication Date) - Marvel (Publisher)