At the end of the original Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker had a lightsaber and not much else. The old man who started to mentor him died at the hands of the Empire’s most feared enforcer and he didn’t know anything about the legacy he was supposed to continue. This week’s Star Wars comic shows that Luke got his next lessons about the Jedi in a really unlikely place.
Marvel Comics’ Star Wars series has partially been about how Luke Skywalker grows into the role of a Force-wielder. He hunts for clues that can help him tap the innate abilities that Ben Kenobi said he had. He ran into Boba Fett along the way. In Star Wars #8 last month, Luke’s quest took him to the smuggler’s moon Nar Shadaa, where his lightsaber was stolen. In this week’s Star Wars #9, he gets it back but is abducted by Grakkus the Hutt, an underworld kingpin who’s got one hell of a Jedi fetish.
I like this idea a lot, because it accentuates how time-lost and mysterious the Jedi must have seemed in the era after they got slaughtered in the prequel trilogy. Collecting Jedi memorabilia would be like hunting down gear and uniforms from, say, World War II. These things would have historical importance and, in the case of items that once belonged to the Sith, a whiff of the taboo. There’s a slightly similar beat in Lando #4, where the least trustworthy man in the galaxy has led a heist to steal the Emperor’s yacht, which is packed with ancient Sith artifacts.
Lando doesn’t care anything about that Force hogwash; he’s just trying to pay his way out of a gambling debt. But the whole reason Grakkus kidnapped the Rebel Alliance’s most important pilot is because he needs help unlocking a Jedi holocron. Problem is, Luke’s never done this before. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to work…
…until, of course, it does.
This plot theme — where readers watch Luke learn about what is, essentially, his spiritual legacy — is particularly interesting because this December’s Force Awakens movie might show him walking John Boyega’s Finn character along the same path. It’s cool seeing that Anakin Skywalker’s spawn had many teachers on the way to Return of the Jedi‘s fateful father/son showdown. And it’s a clever twist that one of them was inadvertently a Hutt.
Comments
5 responses to “Meet The Hutt Who Helped Luke Skywalker Learn About The Jedi”
I thought the people who were Star Wars fans got this, Obi Wan and Yoda where already dead when Luke met them. Vader would have felt the Force of them so they ceased to be as the ultimate means of hiding. Yoda foreshadows this in the 3rd movie.
‘Were’.
That is all.
Eh, I don’t personally think they were dead when Luke met them. They died eventually, but they were very much alive when Luke came across them.
You almost make it seem like Vader can sense the force of Obi-Wan and Yoda on their respective planets from the Death Star or wherever he is posted. I don’t think I’ve come across an instance in the Star Wars cannon universe where a Jedi has displayed such an extensive range of force detection.
In the now deleted EU of Star Wars, the Emperor and his agents hunted down and killed all the Jedi they searched for them through mundane means and when they got close Vader went to look for them.
Did you notice that when they died they simply faded out rather than leaving a body, yet all the other dead Jedi in the Prequels left corpses behind.
Old Ben Kenobi, died years ago it was said by Uncle Owen at the start of a new hope. And that was before they re-edited it.
If we’re playing by old EU rules then Yoda was hidden by the dark side Force area on Dagobah that Luke entered. No idea how they retconned Obi Wan not being found.
However… I might argue the logic of two strong Force users choosing to become PURE Force beings to escape Force detection. But, then again, Yoda and Obi Wan were fools whose failures and lack of forethought as Jedi, as friends and as mentors, were more or less responsible for the state of the galaxy in the OT. So jacking up their Force level is totally the way they would choose to ‘hide’.
On the other hand, they absolutely were not dead until Luke found them, and the mostly excellent and canon Clone Wars cartoon pretty much spells out how becoming a Force ghost works and why not everyone achieved it. But how Anakin managed it is still a mystery…