Luke Skywalker gets back to Jedi business in Star Wars #19, written by Charles Soule, drawn by Marcos Castiello, colored by Rachelle Rosenberg and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
In terms of Luke Skywalker, the big hook to any of his stories set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi is the question of how he went from “handily whupped by Darth Vader” to “calmly cool under pressure mostly-Jedi” between the two films. For Luke, the story of this period is very much the story of completing his Jedi training. That’s not the only Luke story worth telling, of course, but this series has, thus far, placed it mostly on the back burner in light of other things (like the search for Han Solo), aside from a brief quest that resulted in him obtaining a new lightsaber. But with this issue, writer Charles Soule and artist Marco Castiello move the matter of Luke’s ongoing Jedi training into the foreground of the series.
Motivated by his encounters with Darth Vader in the course of “The War of the Bounty Hunters,” Luke decides it’s time once and for all to return to the training he abandoned on Dagobah, to the point where he’s willing to tell Leia the Alliance is just going to have to get along without him for a while (Leia is, as usual, pretty chill and pragmatic about it). This leads to Luke setting off on a tour around the galaxy to locations known to be connected to the Jedi. In the process, he revisits a series of worlds steeped in Star Wars lore, ending on the river moon of Al’doleem. There, in the city of Am’balar, he meets a local mechanic whose life was saved by a Jedi shortly after the rise of the Empire. Sympathetic to Luke’s mission, he directs him to an Imperial facility in the nearby Mount Pasavaal, which once served as a Jedi Temple. There, Luke gets his hands on a holocron recorded by none other than Luke’s erstwhile master, Yoda.
While Luke’s mission is a fun trip through Wookiepedia, Soule ensures it’s more than an excuse to namedrop locales familiar to hardcore Star Wars fans. After arriving in Am’balar, Luke attempts to use Obi-Wan’s Jedi mind trick on a pair of Stormtroopers, and fails. Later, after Colli leads him to the Imperial facility, he debates his next move. On the one hand, he could storm the base, lightsaber ablazin’, and take whatever Jedi artifacts he can find by force. Instead, he meditates, his communion with the Force depicted by Castiello in a manner similar to how Vader’s meditations were depicted in the second Darth Vader ongoing series (also written by Soule): as a being of colored energy (in Luke’s case, blue to Vader’s red) hovering over the landscape. When Luke emerges, he tries the mind trick again, and succeeds, obtaining the holocron without violence.
Not only does it underscore the fact that Luke isn’t, for all the moon-shaped space stations he’s blown up, a violent person at heart, it highlights just how far along on the path to becoming a Jedi he actually is. For all that Luke’s encounters with Vader have shaken his faith in himself, he turns away from the violent option of his own accord. Then, seeking guidance, he turns to the Force, and when he emerges, he has the confidence he needs to pull off the mind trick. More importantly, he has, with the help of the Force, found a way to accomplish his goals without violence or aggression. Not only does it echo his actions later in The Last Jedi (in which he similarly accomplishes his goal without raising a hand in aggression), it also shows that Luke is closer to being a Jedi than he realizes, espousing the values imparted to him by Yoda in his actions.
In the reveal that Yoda is the author of the holocron Luke obtains, Soule also hangs a lampshade on another (relatively minor) question about the post-Empire period: Why, if Luke is seeking further training, doesn’t he return to Yoda until the second act of Jedi (at which point he badgers Yoda to death with questions). Soule waves in this general direction earlier in the issue, before Luke departs on his journey, saying he wishes Yoda would talk to him. Whether that’s Soule’s last word on the question or not, the presence of a holographic Yoda at issue’s end suggests there’s more to come on this front.
All in all, this issue makes for a needed centering of the series after what felt like six and a half years of “War of the Bounty Hunters” tie-ins, the narrative equivalent of when you stray too far using Google Maps and press the little arrow to zoom back to where you’re standing. Luke’s quest to become a Jedi is one the more notable plot and character arcs of this era, and seeing Soule begin to engage with it in earnest is much appreciated — even as, in the process, he shows us Luke is already more Jedi-like than he realizes.
Force Facts
- Yoda’s lack of desire/inability to talk to Luke is a reference to issue #1, in which Luke reached out to him through the Force shortly after his duel with Vader but received no answer.
- The list of Jedi/Force-relevant worlds Luke visits comes from a list Artoo has compiled from the Imperial archive he accessed while plugged into the Death Star during A New Hope, the same archive that later helped him fill in the map to Ach-To in The Force Awakens.
- Luke dismisses returning to Jedha (which he knows to be in bad shape due to a visit there in a story from the series’ previous volume, “The Ashes of Jedha”) and Tempes (which is where he found his current lightsaber and battled an Inquisitor in issue #6).
- Among the worlds he visits are Ilum, the planet from which the Jedi obtained many of the crystals for their lightsabers and which the Empire later mined for Kyber to power the Death Stars’ super lasers (and was after that turned into Starkiller Base by the First Order) and Lothal, one of the principal settings of the animated series Rebels.
- When Luke meets Colli, he tells him a story from when Colli was a boy of a Jedi named Kirak Infil’a, who saved Colli’s life and the life of his baby sister before dying in battle with Darth Vader, an abridged version of the story from Darth Vader (2017) #4.
- After acquiring the holocron from the Imperial’s Mount Pasavaal facility, Luke notes his familiarity with the devices, having encountered them in Grakkus the Hutt’s storehouse on Nar Shadda, a reference to the “Showdown on the Smuggler’s Moon” story from Star Wars (2015) #7-12.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
