Darth Vader comes face-to-face once more with his coarsest, roughest, most irritating foe, one which gets everywhere in Star Wars: Darth Vader #26 written by Greg Pak, art by Raffele Ienco, colored by Carlos Lopez and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
It’s the one where Vader fights sand.
That may sound glib and/or reductive, but that’s really what happens in Darth Vader #26. Picking up where last issue left off, Vader mounts the reportedly unflyable podracer, flies off into a sandstorm, finds the stranded Kitster and Sabé and, when the storm proves too much for even Vader to fend off with the Force, he calls down a turbolaser strike to turn the sand around him into glass (take that, sand!), enabling him to walk out of the storm, the wounded Sabé in his arms.
To writer Greg Pak’s credit, as much as that’s the plot of the issue, it really is about Vader’s childhood hatred of particulate rock. Scattered throughout the plot beats of the issue are flashbacks to important moments in Anakin’s life, each showing the way sand factored into the events, from the obvious (Anakin and his mother fighting their way through a sandstorm) to the more oblique (the moment in Attack of the Clones when Padme gets blasted off the troop carrier and lands in…sand). The back and forth cuts underscore just how much sand has always been a thorn in Vader’s side, further reinforcing the predicament he’s in – while underscoring just how much Sabé has, presumably, come to mean to him, as he basically ventures into a swirling mass of his childhood bully just to rescue her.
Some of the flashbacks are almost comically on the nose, like when Anakin pulls a handful of sand out of his pocket just before going in to see the Jedi Council in The Phantom Menace (you know, the scene where Space Samuel L. Jackson and a puppet tell a nine year old boy that missing the mother he said goodbye to like 15 minutes ago is how Space Hitlers are born). And there’s an inherent absurdity to the whole thing – even the paragraph above, where I try to make the paragraph above that seem less absurd, is still absurd in its own way. We’re talking about an issue where one of the greatest cinematic villains of all time fights a sandstorm.
Yet there is something charming and, yes, entertaining in that absurdity. It’s taking the “I don’t like sand” meme and fully leaning into the inherent mockery of the soliloquy, as if to say, “yes, Vader DOES hate sand, and you’re going to learn exactly why in this issue, thank you very much!” The juxtaposition between the darkly gothic Vader, this figure of power and menace, raging against these little bits of rock swirling around him that he’s hated since he was a little kid (all to rescue a woman who looks a lot like his dead wife) is delightful. It’s funny, but not in a mean-spirited way. We’re laughing with Vader, not at him. We want him to defeat the sand, or at least get in some good licks.
As if to underscore that, the issue concludes with Emperor Palpatine, himself a character pretty firmly centered on the axis of “sinister” and “campy”, sensing Vader’s emotional state as he emerges from the storm and letting out an uproarious laugh (at, presumably, Vader coming to view Sabé as a proxy for the wife and mother he couldn’t save). His laugh then echoes to a pair of Royal Guards, who, in a great use of body language from artist Rafaele Ienco, cock their heads at one another, as if to say, “can you believe this guy?” (it’s even funnier when you realize that from their perspective, it’s just their super-powerful boss sitting in a chair mumbling to himself before suddenly cackling in delight). Clearly, as much as the events of this issue are meant to be cathartic for Darth Vader, we’re also not supposed to not be somewhat amused by the inherent absurdity of its premise.
If there’s any misstep here, it’s a minor one, and that’s opening the issue with a recreation of the Attack of the Clones scene that started it all, as Teen Anakin expresses his hatred of sand to Padme for the first time. It’s largely unnecessary, and reads as if Pak doesn’t trust his audience enough to get the full context of what’s about to unfold.
That relatively insignificant quibble aside, Darth Vader #26 is a delight. Pak has spent much of this series building up Vader into a kind of force of nature, and now he pits that force against a literal force of nature. The result is equal parts searing and absurd, introspective and hilarious. We are left empathizing with Vader even as we smirk at the image of a little boy bedeviled by errant grains of sand, coarse and ever-present, plucked from his pockets at his darkest, most painful moments. It’s a terribly narrow tightrope of tone to traverse, and Pak pulls it off with panache.
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
