Comic Review: The Deep-Cut Villain Atha Prime Enters the Current Canon in "Star Wars: Jedi Knights" #2
Yesterday saw the release of the second issue in Marvel Comics’ ongoing series Star Wars: Jedi Knights, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
Jedi Knights #2 begins with a splash page flashing forward to a battle sequence that will take place later in the issue, which is not a device I love (Why not just start at the beginning? Readers can be patient.) but here we are. Then writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Madibek Musabekov cut to “hours earlier" and the arrival of Master Yoda and Jedi Knight Vetna Mooncrest on the remote moon of Veeros. They’re greeted by Blue-Tark, the droid majordomo of the moon’s leader Atha Prime, and here’s where things get exciting for longtime Star Wars fans. Both Blue-Tark (originally called Blue-Four) and Atha Prime were originally created for Kenner’s eventually cancelled “The Epic Continues" line of Star Wars toys, which was intended to continue the narrative after the events of Return of the Jedi in the mid-1980s. It’s pretty fun to see them resurrected and repurposed here, though notably they did appear in altered forms in the Legends continuity as well. Anyway, Yoda and Vetna are on Veeros to investigate Atha Prime’s renowned “bio-fields" and initially Blue-Tark leads them to a decoy field, though the Jedi can of course sense that something is off.
They pretend to leave, instead using their ship to sneak around to another entrance of Atha’s fortress, with Yoda and Vetna then making their way through secret passageways until Vetna’s cybernetic implants begin to react to a nearby source of radiation. Here’s where they find an enormous room filled with biological samples in big jars, which prove to be Xenomorph-like aliens that attack our heroes. They struggle to fight them off, finding them nearly indestructible, and soon Yoda senses that they are being watched by Atha Prime himself. There’s a confrontation between the Jedi Master and the mysterious staff-wielding villain and a moment where I have to admit I’m not sure I understand exactly what happens: with a wave of his hand Yoda emits some sort of yellow-green light energy (have we seen this happen before?) that tears open Atha’s mask, and the diminutive Jedi is left shocked by what he sees behind it. Atha Prime flees the scene, leaving Yoda and Vetna to deal with his droid soldiers and his deadly “Xerexi" creatures, which they eliminate on the moon by calling in Mace Windu and other Jedi allies for help.
But then we see that Atha has a whole bunch more Xerexi on his ship, and we cut to Coruscant, where young Obi-Wan Kenobi is training with his master Qui-Gon Jinn. Troubled by his own vision, Obi-Wan tells Qui-Gon about his research into someone named Corlis Rath, who Qui-Gon says is “the individual who attacked me recently while I was on Vekura." Obi-Wan now has a name and a holographic image of an unmasked Corlis he found in the Jedi archives, so the investigation will surely continue after that cliffhanger ending. So yeah, besides being bothered by the single-page flashforward, I ended up enjoying this issue quite a bit and I’m looking forward to seeing how Guggenheim develops the character of Atha Prime– a deep-cut slice of Star Wars history who gets another chance to flourish in this comic. Can’t wait!
Star Wars: Jedi Knights #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.