This December, the soon-to-be thrilling Star Wars: The Last Jedi rocks movie screens across the world…and the reverberations are felt all around a galaxy far, far away! First up, learn the secret of the mineral planet Crait! Long before it became a battleground between the Resistance and the First Order, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa led the Rebellion there in search of a new home!
Published: December 27, 2017
Rating: Rated T
Writer: Ben Blacker, Benjamin Acker
Penciler: Mike Mayhew
Cover Artist: Marco Checchetto
One of the most striking visuals from The Last Jedi was the planet Crait with its red sands, and desolate environment. All we knew from the film was that the rebel alliance had once used the planet as a base of operations, but left it in haste after imperials had found it also.
In Star Wars: The Storms of Crait we get to find out exactly what happened and we now know that Luke was physically on this planet in the past, and returned years later, via force fax.
From here I’m going to be delving into spoilers, so if you haven’t read this current Marvel comic, then please hold off and read it first. You’ll miss some of the key surprises.
We open in the middle of a chase, not unlike The Last Jedi, where the rebel fleet is on the run from the Imperial Navy, trying to find a permanent base of operations. Luke, Wedge, and Han flying alongside their X-Wings in the Falcon weave their way through some of the thickest squadrons of TIEs you’ll see this side of The Battle of Endor. Leia pushes Mon Mothma to agree to allow them to set up a base on the inhospitable planet Crait, a mining world, that has long since been abandoned, however a friend of her father Bail Organa: Trusk Berinato has scouted the world, and knows of its history. He meets them on the surface, and helps them find a spot. Luke, and Han go on a scouting mission, and Trusk does his best James Bond, taking Leia to dinner. All is not well however as Trusk has Imperial entanglements, with Scar Squadron awaiting our heroes in an ambush. What follows is fun, hilarious and filled with one of the Luke’s post ANH lightsaber confrontations.
Written by Ben Blacker and Ben Acker, the script is tight, and story feels very much like our ANH era heroes. Marvel has a good team of writers here, that keenly follow the strengths of the characters while observing a key eye for what Harrison, Mark and Carrie put into their characters back in the days of the OT.
Mike Mayhew, (at first I thought, is he related to another famous Mayhew in Star Wars) does an amazing job, matching the likenesses of the actors, and characters while giving the vehicles, like the Ski Speeders the accuracy it needs.
Luke in this is interesting for a number of reasons, you’ll see him as the bored Captain Skywalker, who is awaiting anything for adventure (always as he looks to the future, I could hear Yoda saying), onto his scouting mission on Crait where we see some of his moisture farming skills coming to light, and helping he and Wedge in finding out about the wildlife in the story, which factors heavily. Later in the story, Scar Squadron find out about this the hard way.
Han Solo is Han Solo as always, and is impatient, and a kid – no, really. You could see he is five minutes behind everything the characters are thinking about logically in this, and the humour in that is priceless.
Let’s not forget some choice moments with Princess Leia Organa, well ahead of the game, as she banked on her tactics to ambush the arrogant and overconfident Trusk. She also seems to have helped to show Mon Mothma the importance of finding another key point that the alliance can launch all of their attacks from and stay hidden.
Then there’s Trusk, who should clearly be Jonathan Pryce, he speaks like him, and even the wild hair is perfectly like the actor.
In a nutshell this is exactly what you want from a side story to Last Jedi, gives you the answers while giving us a new adventure for Luke, Han and Leia.