Lit A few questions on Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison

So I've finally been reading through a few comics I got in the last days of Dark Horse's ownership of the license, mainly stuff from the last couple years I hadn't gotten to yet. Foremost of which was Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison, since I've heard so many good things about it.

Now, I'll say from the start I liked it on the whole, I thought the plot was decent and the general concept good, I liked the viewpoint of Tohm and the depiction of Vader and Trachta in particular, and in particular the fact that they came up with like a dozen characters among the Prism prisoners (Prismers?) who immediately set my imagination going despite being basically one-panel cameos.

That being said, a number of things about the comic bothered me, so I figured I'd bring them up to see if there was any consensus about them, since I've basically missed any discussion on the comic when it was released.

First off and most glaringly - Tohm mentions/shows in flashback that his parents were killed by the Separatists. He looks about five years old in that flashback. Obviously this is a pretty strange and glaring timing discrepancy.

Second, a headmaster is the highest ranking official on Coruscant? Seriously? Even if he does still have his general's rank and has the help of the other general, are there no other military officers? What about the imperial advisors? Or the Senate, which is supposed to be still powerful at this point? On a related note, also - a few hundred cadets, almost none of whom had combat experience, were enough to take over Coruscant?

Finally, was Tarkin established as being a Grand Moff at this point in any other source? I always thought the position was created sometime closer to ANH, and that even then he wasn't the only one.

Like I said, I liked the comic overall, but these were all issues that stuck out and took me out of the story, some to a greater degree than others.

 

I haven't read it, but with Tohm it's pretty clear that the Separatists existed before the actual outbreak of the Clone Wars. Possible explanation?

 

I always felt he looked more 12-14ish, but as Orman mentioned, the Sep crisis went on from pretty much after Ep 1 until several years into the Empire.

He is a highly decorated war hero and the rest really are likely elsewhere waging campaigns and helping build the infrastructure for the new Empire. The only person that might actually be higher ranked per se would be Armand Isard and he is not really military either.

Not Military and he properly actually has Senate help

Well he does have the either generals as well, so they likely just handed him the keys to the planetary defences and the actual key structures. His cadets just happen to be his direct supporters.

It was Retconed as having had happened much earlier, when they had the Death Star show up at the end of ROTS, he must already have been in charge of the project for a while, so he now had been made Grand Moff pretty much right after declaration of the Empire.

 

The Tarkin novel provides a newcanon scene of him being promoted from Moff to Grand Moff - and is about 5 years after ROTS.

In The Essential Guide to Warfare, Tarkin is already a Moff (at the "oversector" level rather than the "sector governor" level - so one of only 20) - at the end of the Clone Wars.

 

One thing that bugged me with the comic was how the totalitarian empire would accept a crippled one armed disfigured person like Tohm into an imperial academy in the first place.

 

Well, they have a half robot guy on one of the top positions. Maybe Vader lobbies for the handicapped?

 

The Dark Lord wouldn't put up with any of this able bodied discrimination! Equality for cyborgs!11eleven11!!1

 

The ending bugged me too I mean did Emperor seriously consider Tohm to be a legitimate replacement for Vader? I mean what did he exactly do in Ghost Prison that put Vader to shame.

 

I think Vader is just a jerk.

 

The Empire need not be so cartoonishly evil as to discriminate against every possible group that they can. They exalt competence: surely his success would be a propaganda victory for them, if nothing else.

 

He did plan and organize the whole thing and Vader is not exactly the best person at long term, sensible planning

 

Would Tohm have fared any better with the death star or Luke situation?

 

Unlikely, as he is neither a pilot nor a force warrior, but the Emperor can always use minions with different skills. Though who knows maybe he could have convinced Tarkin that is a really good idea to launch the rest of the TIEs, or maybe even have replaced Tarkin as the Death Star Commander. Alas he died.

 

The plot was really stupid. It's really not that great a comic.

But the muddle of post-ROTS sources seemed to have Tarkin promoted to Grand Moff about a year after ROTS, probably just because of the inevitability of someone somewhere using his famous rank. Even without a promotion, though, it makes sense that Tarkin would be one of the highest-ranking Imperial personnel. Not only was he effectively a Grand Moff as one of the original Moffs of what were effectively Oversectors, but he was basically set up by prior material as the number three, or even two, in the Empire, as the person second only to Palpatine in forming the New Order's ideology and the Empire's policy, and having political power out of proportion even to his rank as Grand Moff. He was basically the Hamilton to Palpatine's Washington. If Tarkin shows up and says he's taking command in an emergency, then just do what he says. Whatever the official succession may be, what's the Speaker of the Senate in a crisis next to Wilhuff Tarkin, the Empire's greatest mind, Palpatine's right-hand man, and the Court's most potent power player?