Comics Star Wars: Age of Republic

Those "problems" are intentional, though; if Obi-Wan had Qui-Gon's characterization, then "I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda. I was wrong." makes no sense anymore, since Qui-Gon's whole deal is being more Jedi than the Jedi.

 

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*record scratch* Yup, that's me. Darth Maul. Sith Lord. You're probably wondering how I got here...

 

Star Wars: Age of Republic - Darth Maul #1

Synopsis:

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"Ash"

Pretty straight forward story taking place after the mini Maul arc and before the events of TPM.

Maul still has his blood lust so he's on a tight lease. Sidious lets him loose in the lower levels of Coruscant. He befriends a thief, earns his trust, and they ambush a spice deal between two other gangs. Maul's interest in this thief is due to the fact that he senses the Force around him. Maul ultimately uses a piece of scrap metal to kill the thief, but unfortunately, he still has the blood lust to kill Jedi.

Sidious tries to teach him patience by taking him to Malachor, where Ahsoka, Ezra, and Kanan find Maul in Rebels. Sidious instructs Maul to breath in some ash and he has a vision. He's a Jedi and his dual blade is blue in color. He kills a giant monster and saves a village of his fellow race. He's invited to share a meal with them, but then he kills them all. He's not a Jedi. The Jedi are a lie told to the galaxy. Soon he's surrounded by the ghosts of that ancient battlefield on Malachor with blue, green, yellow and purple blades, standard and cross blades to keep consistent with what we saw in Rebels, and then the vision ends before he attacks.

Ultimately, Maul learns that you can't just use your blind rage to defeat the Jedi, you need a plan and you need to be patient.

Unfortunately we know that it is a lesson he never learns.

Just like the Qui-Gon story, Maul's story was decent and I thought the art was fine. I enjoyed it for the most part. Nothing super special as the writers' hands are kind of tied when you place the story where it is in the timeline, but it is what it is.

 

I like how Maul has been building

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up his underworld empire since even before TPM, seems he took over the assets of the Xrexus cartel after he slew her. And built upon it as he's developing a vast network.

I like how Maul tests and gauges his prey, the Force sensitive thief. Maul is very cerebral and taciturn. A part of Maul seems to tempted to the Light Side like in his mini-series before this, with Edra Kaitis. But his Sith training(he is indoctrinated is that the Jedi are bad and committed atrocities against his brotherhood so Jedi are evil to him) and his own battle rage permits him on to slaughter all his prey. Jinn and Maul have almost similar visions but opposite or inverse. A part of Maul is not evil, there is indeed light despite what Sidious has trained him to be and think. Maul fighting against his own Light Side rather like Jinn fighting against his own Dark Side. What paths and futures, so many.

I think will learn there is a lot more officially to Maul than meets the eye as time goes on. The defiance that Maul has for Sidious runs so deep. I think Sidious feared Maul becoming a Jedi .

Maul killed that Rancor-like beast like it was nothing, much like he did those Rathars,lol.

 

MASTER IM TRIPPING BALLS HERE

 

I do love the sprinkles of the old republic era.

Its interesting that even though green and blue were also the main jedi colors back then, it seems yellow and purple were more common in usage then the PT era. That's was true for Legends as well. But with crystals not starting out with a color in canon, could some crystals have more of a probability then others to give a jedi a non-green/blue color? And for whatever reason, the Jedi of that era had more access to these crystals then during the clone wars.

Speaking of crossguards, so they were used alongside traditional single blades, but it still begs the question in whether or not the design pre-dates normal lightsabers. Is it merely a stylistic choice that evolved from a world that already had traditional sabers to have small blades on its side? Or is it a product that was made with vents on side because at the time the usual lightsaber didn't exist? And why were crossguards discontinued?

I like to think they are older. But still finding a good reason to be used when regular sabers were invented. Perhaps like in certain cultures of old where a sword was passed on to later generations, a crossguard could be used beyond the jedi who created it. Maybe even becoming a symbol of a movement. We know once upon a time Jedi Crusaders were a thing.

 

Great issue. Jedi Maul was interesting.

 

I don't think it's a property of the crystals themselves, but a property of the Jedi who finds it. The fact that there was a greater variety of colors here suggests to me that there is a greater diversity of Jedi thought at the time, one that becomes more orthodox by the time of Yoda's council.

 

I'm not convinced that was the intention in TPM.

It certainly turned out that way, I grant you, and perhaps Lucas leaned into it later because people responded so positively to the character and Neeson's excellent performance but, as written, Qui-Gon was reckless and shortsighted. For all his kindness. Basically the exact character Obi-Wan described himself as having been in TESB. (Which makes sense, since the character was Obi-Wan in the earliest scripts)

Hell, the first thing Qui-Gon does is smack down Obi-Wan for having actually sensed "the Phantom Menace".

"Pfft, I don't sense anything. Focus, dummy."

We're not, in TPM, presented with a Qui-Gon who is the wisest of the wise. He's a well meaning but ultimately flawed individual.

Though he is, I'd say, the most overtly "heroic" character in the movie.


(And it's not like "I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda" works all that well in light of Dooku, anyway.)

 

Echoing liking the Qui-Gon issue and I totally though Dagobah or Force Planet but the new Red Tree Evilness planet was dope, they had an evil throne and everything! And Qui-Gon still ran away from Thanos. Also notice they didn't used the stoned Yoda TPM Puppet as reference hahahahaha.

 

I agree, and what I saw of him in old Dark Horse comics kept pretty true to this as well. I think a lot of the fandom is very, very prone to seeing what they want to see when it comes to Qui-Gon; I like him, but I think insisting he's really some two-dimensional flawless avatar of perfection who has literally never been mistaken in his life (as I've seen many times in various discussion forums, sometimes argued with great vehemence) does a disservice to the character.

 

He flat out cops to it that Obi-Wan is probably wiser. Although I think Qui-Gon is about as intelligent as they get and sees beyond dogma more easily than most Jedi. His chief asset is that he questions, considers, and keeps striving to understand. That's what makes it so plausible that he's able to maintain his identity after death when no other Jedi has. Just a great character, and I'm always happy to see more of him.

 

Everyone is flawed, but Qui-Gon was the only Jedi who sensed Anakin is the Chosen One.

And Obi-Wan should have been focusing on the present in that moment.

Too much worrying about the future is exactly what draw Anakin to the dark side.

 

Yes, this plays into what I think Lucas was trying to get across as well.

Although it falls completely flat, because Obi-Wan calling Jar-Jar/Anakin "another useless lifeform" is ****ed and not remotely wise.

Qui-Gon was the only Jedi who was like "Why is everyone worrying about this kid becoming Darth Vader? Yeah, he misses his mum but that won't be a problem."

I simply cannot believe that, at the time of writing TPM, Lucas intended for the audience to think Qui-Gon was 100% in the right.

Yes, Anakin (we assume) ultimately restored balance to the Force but did he need to be trained as Jedi to do it? Was that really the wisest course?

Perhaps the path the Force mapped out for him was one in which he gets himself off Tatooine, becomes a celebrated Pod Racer across the galaxy, then follows an instinctual nudge that leads him to crash into the Senatorial Box when noted race-fan Palpatine is in attendance.

 

Well first off, people were not worrying about Anakin becoming Darth Vader, they were just concerned about the fact there's lot of fear in him (understandable considering his situation) and that his future is clouded.

And I believe, and this is just my belief as we'll never know for sure, that if Qui-Gon had lived and trained Anakin, he would have had much more understanding for Anakin's feelings and would even go check on his mum with him. Qui-Gon, unlike Obi-Wan, knew her personally after all.

I love Obi-Wan, but he wasn't the best choice to be Anakin's teacher (something Qui-Gon was wrong about). Obi-Wan is the perfect textbook Jedi and Anakin needed someone more willing to break the rules and disobey the Council. Someone like Qui-Gon.

I'm not saying Qui-Gon was infallible, no one is, but from the PT Jedi, he was the wisest. His death in TPM is the beginning of the death of the Jedi Order.

I'll end with Yoda's quote from the ROTS deleted scene that was also in the novelization "A great Jedi Master, you have become, Qui-Gon Jinn. Your apprentice I gratefully become."

The 900-year old Grand Master of the Jedi Order admitting who was the true master.

 

Read the Maul comic it was appropriately dark, also fun to see Maul got his underworld connections going rather early which works well how he took over Black Sun and started Crimson Dawn. Made me wish there was a Maul Crimson Dawn miniseries, I wanna see Maul being all covertly evil.

I can see people complaining about the one-short format being too short for anything meaningful but I really enjoy one-shot comics so I'm quite excited for the entire "Age Of" run.

 

While the One-Shot format is frustrating now, I think it has to do with the fact that there is SO LITTLE canon material in the PT era to build off of. So every bit we get, there is desire to see it expanded.

I think during the Age of Rebellion, we are going to see connections to material we already have well covered. So while the Rebellion stuff may be interesting, there may not be as much demand to see it fleshed out.

Resistance will be interesting, because I have a feeling that most of the issues are going to be Pre-Force Awakens. This will help fill in the backstory of Rose, Snoke, Finn, and hopefully Rey. I really don’t see them being given the green light on post Last Jedi, though. Thusly, while we will probably want to see some of the issues expanded upon in the future, the one shot format will probably be the best application for this time period.

 

By the time the Age of series hits the ST it'll be tapdancing close to Episode IX and I think we're on the road for some Road To Episode IX content, we even got the Phasma miniseries that was crammed in between TFA and TLJ.

 

I think the Age of Resistance may have a few issues set post TLJ. We've already seen a little from that time period. By the time of those issues we wl be so close to IX that they will be able to show a little. Nothing major and we won't know anything about the plot, but we may see something. They could show some battles or the characters dealing with the aftermath of TLJ in the days after.

 

Im enjoying this series so far... the Maul one was very interesting.

Are previews of the Kenobi and Jango ones available anywhere yet?

 

I have a question that I am not sure has been asked. Each issue is marked at #1 (I bet that is a good sales technique as I usually only start series if I can start at #1) but for anyone more into comics then I, for series setup like this one, do they ever end up continuing it and doing issues 2+? Or will all of these just be one offs?

 

Usually, even if one of these one-offs inspires a series, that series will start with its own #1. So you'd have (as a hypothetical) Star Wars: Age of Republic - Qui-Gon #1 and then, if it were followed up on, Star Wars: Qui-Gon #1 (or whatever).

 

I believe they are all one-offs, but linked as a series of eight for Age of Republic.

The marketing has been pretty messy, giving rise to the kind of confusion you've sketched out - they'd be better off not sticking #1 on, as it gives the idea there will be a #2 or #3 etc.

It'll all be fine for the eventual OHC / Omnibus down the road but for your local comic shop it's an ordering nightmare.

 

I'm going to defend the #1 choice because, as mentioned, it is a one-shot story with apparently no overarching story from one shot to one shot. Truth in adverting!

 

I hope the Jango comic in the future is him training the first batch of clones such as Cody, Bly, Rex, etc.