| Feb. 19th, 2010 @ 05:05 pm Darth Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dark Empire |
|---|
Well, maybe love is a bit strong. I still think the pencilling is sloppy, the coloring garish, the pacing poor, Han's b-plot dull, the sequels ranging from stupid but harmless (Dark Empire II) to just plain bad (Empire's End), and Veitch has a problem making things seem as epic as they should be. But none of that matters. They never truly bothered me. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have a campy yet entertaining spinoff of a Gary Coleman sitcom.
No, my problem was with the central premise; Emperor Palpatine comes back from the dead. In all honesty, this could have been a fantastic idea if not for one thing: it completely guts Anakin Skywalker's story. No, not the Chosen One prophecy; I'm intelligent enough to understand that these works were published at different times. I mean Anakin's sacrifice aboard the second Death Star, destroying the ultimate evil while knowing that he himself would not survive. How dare they undermine that Heroic Sacrifice by bringing Sidious back in a clone body, ready to subjugate the galaxy once more.
But then finally it struck me: The Truth. And not only is it beautiful, and not only does it completely fix the problem, it is also so blindingly obvious that I can't imagine how it has escaped me for so, so long. And that Truth is this:
Anakin didn't sacrifice himself to kill the Emperor. He sacrificed himself to save his son.
And nothing that Dark Empire does can take that away from him. Luke lives, and becomes one of the greatest Jedi in history. And while I still have my issues with the art and writing, I can now say I really respect Dark Empire for what it tried to do. It's an ambitious story, one worthy of Star Wars, and I really need to reread it with my newfound respect for the subject matter. |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
kylej's journal
vengeful