Star Wars: Legacy of Vader #1 is a story about clenched fists in want of something to punch. In a medium that often feels predicated on the punch-as-commodity, the punch as hi-hat clap, the punch as money-shot, it’s remarkable how ineffectual Charles Soule and penciler Luke Ross make these trembling, tightly clenched hands look. The two principal characters of this story — Kylo Ren and ginger-haired arch-adjutant General Armitage Hux — are both men in power who have no philosophy of what to do with power other than use it to hurt someone or something else. To them, the state is a fist. Belief is a fist. Life itself is a fist, and it’s only by using that fist for the one thing it’s good for, punching, that their lives assume some precarious, fleeting meaning.
When there’s nothing around to hit — either because all of their foes have been hit, thoroughly, blown to smithereens, chopped in half and sent sailing in dismembered chunks over the heads of their assembled armies, or because the only foes left will hit back harder — the men become as antsy and uncertain as little boys. After all, if the work of a fist won’t make them happy and whole, what will? Look at the way Ross draws Hux after Kylo dresses him down, angry red rings jittering out from his hands. Look at Kylo pounding his own thighs, baffled and outraged that even here, as he gets everything he’s ever wanted, he still feels miserable and small, the thuds of each blow as big and brash as cartoon explosions. Ross goes big here for a reason — these abstractions, these pops of Mort Walker-esque visual shorthand, speak where the men to whom these fists are attached can’t. Their fists are the most articulate parts of them, and even there, they speak in all-caps, in lurid colors.
This is a story about the worst people in the universe, and how they came to be in charge of it.
It’s a hell of a thing to be reading in February 2025, this tense, fatalistic story of two fragile and volatile men ostensibly on the same team but quietly loathing the other guy and his specific brand of totalitarian delusions of purpose, each of them fumbling over a knot of imperialist ambitions and ego-stoking vanity projects. It’s the sort of ultra-blunt allegory Star Wars excels at (prequel haters be damned), and there’s no one better than Soule to tell it.
Soule, who has previously written a harrowing 25-issue run of Darth Vader in 2017 and the four-issue The Rise of Kylo Ren in 2020, is practiced in getting a compelling story out of venal, embittered Star Wars bad guys adrift in the carapace of their own mythology — but in both of those previous stories, he was writing about someone who was pointedly stuck in a subservient position. His Vader, whom he introduces moments after the end of Revenge of the Sith, is fluent at leveraging violence and fear, but transparently acting at the whim of Emperor Palpatine (this seductive, unsettling relationship between Vader and the Emperor is a recurring thing in Soule’s Star Wars work). The Kylo of his 2020 mini is a kid, torn between his loyalty to Luke and the cosseting flattery of Snoke. These earlier books are stories about insecure personalities being manipulated by stronger, subtler, wills — if we recognize Vader and young Ben Solo as monsters, they’re legible as leashed monsters, and therefore, ones that remain a little sad, a little pitiable.
The Legacy of Vader, in contrast, takes place shortly after The Last Jedi. Snoke is dead — the bravura opening sequence, in fact, has Kylo asserting his absolute grip on the First Order while jettisoning his erstwhile mentor’s bisected carcass out of an airlock.
He’s in (forgive me) his imperial phase, with nothing holding himself back except his own doubts, which he promptly sets out to conquer. The title of the book is an interesting hint at some of the tensions brewing here. In a gorgeous double splash soaked in reds and blacks, with faces rendered by Ross with the sorts of spidery, etched lines I associate with Richard Corben at his very gnarliest, Kylo breaks down at the recollection of, well, everything he’s just spent two movies worth of his life doing — killing his father, his uncle, his mentor, breaking his mother’s heart, and finding and losing Rey.
To him, Vader is a mythic figure — an invincible leader and a blueprint for what it meant to be a man, a user of the Force, a grown-up. But that was never who Vader was — he was the whipped but dangerous dog of Soule’s run, Greg Pak’s tortured and tragic Gothic loser, the cunning but myopic schemer offered up by Kieron Gillen, and beneath all that the wounded, precarious ego of Anakin Skywalker. Kylo’s quest to reckon with — and overcome — his grandfather’s nebulous “legacy” is predicated on the reader’s knowledge that he’s fundamentally misapprehending the sort of person Vader was, and how much agency he ever really had. Let’s get back to that image of clenched fists — to Kylo, the sheer clarity of Vader’s existence as a killing machine, as a vehicle for terror, gave him an enviable sense of definition. When Vader clenched his fists, it wasn’t a vain gesture — people, famously, died. He sees Vader as having what he lacks — a telos, a sense of a mission or destiny that might draw him like an arrow and set him loose in the right direction. What he misses is that Vader was never the master of shit — he was born a certain kind of slave and lived his second life as a different, much more pitiable kind of slave. Soule introduces us to a Kylo who realizes there’s nothing externally preventing him from finding that mission — and, characteristically, he immediately translates that into the language of vendetta.
I think it’s uncontroversial to say that Kylo Ren as he’s portrayed throughout the three sequel films doesn’t quite work. Adam Driver gives it his all, but Kylo is a different guy in each film, in ways that are difficult to parse charitably as character development. Is he the hair-trigger toxic fanboy of The Force Awakens? The Last Jedi’s brooding, smoldering tempter? Or even The Rise of Skywalker’s rote enemies-to-lovers bad-boy? Beneath Driver’s really quite impressive work in imbuing the character with a magnetic, unpredictable physical presence, there’s always this lingering sense of not being certain why this dude is doing anything he does that no amount of doleful gazes and sweaty, shirtless temper tantrums can entirely smoothe over. Indeed, by the time we’re reunited with him at the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker, meandering about on the spooky Sith world Mustafar chopping people apart, there’s a prevailing sense of “well, sure.”
Combined with the franchise’s skittishness about playing around in the sequel trilogy’s milieu, it’s as if poor, unstable Kylo has spent the past six years trapped inside a cordon of space traffic cones — a tricky, divisive character built up around a bundle of contradictions arguably not worth the effort of untangling (notwithstanding the massive, massive, astonishingly trust-me-on-this massive popularity of fanfics in which those contradictions are untangled at extreme length and with extreme sensuality). There’s clearly something there — there’s something that has always been there, in the story of a wayward kid led astray by a feeling of not measuring up to the legendary stature of his immediate family, who wrestles with a power he resents for underscoring his own frailties, who actively chooses, over and over again, to cause harm against his own better instincts. He’s an extrapolation of so many dumb, bitter kids sucked in and devoured by the far-right pipelines of the world, poisoned by paranoid narratives about all the other people holding him back from the strength he feels he’s owed. But unlike his bathetic shadow, Hux — the very image of a posturing 21st century neo-Nazi with his precise Imperial cosplay and reedy bravado — there’s the suggestion of something else there, someone who knows he’s been conned and is eager for something different, something better than the mere accumulation of power through force.
A lot of this, to be sure, is reading between the lines — again, it’s difficult to chart a particularly consistent trajectory for him between all three movies, apart from individual acting decisions, little gestures or tics, that vibrate with a certain nervous, outraged intensity. Soule’s accomplishment here, one he pulls off with the absolute confidence of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing, is to pull these threads together, to make Kylo Ren make sense. When The Rise of Skywalker shows him cutting through anonymous hordes on Mustafar, it’s in service of exposition. When this comic cuts, with just as much abruptness, to him cutting through very similar anonymous hordes on Mustafar, it’s a coherent, clever and deeply revealing character beat. Look at this, we’re prompted; he sits down to think through his difficult, complicated relationship with his grandfather’s legacy, and instead of unpacking his damn thoughts, he goes to his grandfather’s literal haunted castle planet to kick the asses of a bunch of lava people. He’s trying to skip the excruciating work of reconciliation and remorse by fast forwarding to an action scene. That’s establishing character! It’s establishing a profoundly troubled, quite unpleasant and extremely weird character, but good god does Soule make it work.
Ross rises to the occasion here as well, drawing an action set-piece that is dynamic and exciting while still conveying the gut-level hollowness of what’s functionally a one-sided slaughter. I’ll cite Corben again — a surprising reference point for a Star Wars comic, but an intriguing and effective one.
As Kylo gets closer to this destination, and as the fight becomes more evidently a rout, we lose a little bit of that finely etched linework, as well as the orderly arrangement of borders. As he loses himself in the battle, Ross’ composition gets tighter, focusing more on close-ups of slashes, roars and dismembered limbs, the panels tumbling into a chaotic cascade of cramped, off-kilter cubes. It’s a beautiful effect, especially within a climactic double spread that screenshots can’t quite do justice.
Colorist Nolan Woodard shines in this sequence as well — the sickly orange skies of Mustafar reddening to match the sharp glare of Kylo’s lightsaber as the sequence progresses. In general, the issue is drawn as much like a horror comic as anything else, with frequent, abrupt cutaways to tightly framed close-ups of Kylo’s eyes. Ross draws his eyes as predatory, piercing, really alarming. I mentioned in my review of last week’s Star Wars: A New Legacy one-shot that Marvel’s Star Wars line occasionally suffers from a play-it-safe visual approach — Ross and Woodard surpassed my expectations in giving this book an unusual, tonally effective and frequently striking look that is immediately and recognizably something new.
Eventually, Kylo gets where he’s going, and ends the comic with a surprising encounter and an equally surprising offer that revolves around a cool enough continuity pull that I’ll refrain from spoiling it. What’s germane is that it leaves us with a clearer sense of what the title means — for the short-term, at least, it appears that we will be following Kylo on a literal journey in his grandfather’s footprints. “His loss, his pain, his rage at the things that happened to him became his fuel,” Kylo’s creepy Virgil-figure explains of Vader’s titular legacy. “[…] I can tell you how he did it. I can tell you how he turned his past … into his power.”
It’s a tantalizing cliffhanger, and a fitting cap to an issue that briskly takes enormous strides in finding a compelling, cohesive core to Kylo’s sometimes muddled character. It feels surreal to be this jazzed about seeing where Kylo’s quest takes him next, about watching Soule remediate the clunky leaps in character that take place between movies.
There’s something thrilling about how precarious, how unlikely this comic feels — the extent to which Soule is willing and able to keep Kylo Ren repugnant and pitiful but irresistibly compelling. It’s a token of his confidence as a scripter, his faith that whatever swings he makes, the art team is capable of matching his ambitions. Soule too, perhaps, is in his imperial phase, and that swagger is nowhere more apparent than the issue’s opening sequence. “Shall I introduce you?” Hux asks, as Kylo, Snoke-chunks in two, prepares to greet his new subjects. “No,” replies Kylo, vexed and haunted but wearing a slight smirk, about to embark on shedding his ghosts, stepping out from other people’s narratives, “I’ll do it myself.”
Stray notes
- Watto fans rejoice — he doesn’t die in this one.
- The visual of Snoke’s dead ass floating overhead is creepy and bleakly funny — this, like Soule’s Vader, is a fairly heavy book, but pops of black humor like this are welcome.
- Watto fans, I hope you’re sitting down for this — the next issue promises a trip to Tatooine, where I’m sure everything is fine and everybody is alive and doing great.
- It’s still unclear how large of a role the ill-fated Hux will play in this series, especially if Kylo’s road trip turns out to be an extended one, but Soule pulls off the feat of making him an intriguing player. I’m hoping to see a lot more of the little slimeball.
Holly Raymond
Holly Raymond is a writer and professor who lives in Vermont with her wife and her dog, King Francis.
