Star Wars #31: It’s Cold Outside, There’s No Kind of Atmosphere

Star Wars doesn’t always get a chance to deal with stuff like holes in time and space. When ships go into hyperspace, they shift dimensionally, but after thousands of years of perfecting its travel hyperspace is pretty straightforward. There is not much to fear from it. One group messed around with hyperspace like crazy, which was the Nihil of “The High Republic” era. They manipulated it, even weaponized it. They found shortcuts no one else could use and pockets between space and hyperspace to make the perfect hideout. Cut to hundreds of years later to just under a year after the events of The Empire Strikes Back, and this issue finds Luke, Leia, and the gang stuck without the Nihil secrets of how to get out. With the war against the Empire reaching its climax and Han Solo still trapped in carbonite, the galaxy needs those Star Warriors back. Unable to do much, they are at the mercy of the society of similarly trapped colonists that inhabit No-Space. This issue takes a moment to tell their history and give the heroes a bit of downtime to figure out what to do.

This issue is a classic wild science fiction story that nods to many classic TV shows and other mediums. Star Wars is often filled with fantasy or war stories, sometimes horror or romance. Only occasionally does it go full-on science fiction. This chapter is like something out of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It exists in a weird dimension where nothing physically works the way it would in regular space. It features a culture born of a fleet like in the original Battlestar Galactica. It involves a main cast of likable plucky characters caught in a bleakly impossible situation that they will undoubtedly survive with some quick thinking, like in Star Trek or Red Dwarf. This same story would fit well into any space comic series, like the 90’s X-Men or Guardians of the Galaxy comic. It Feels like a neatly contained story arc that is familiar and also unique to Star Wars. This is one for Sci-Fi fans.

The art returns to the style of most of this series, which trades in the specific likenesses of familiar characters from the movies for more colorful almost cartoony comic book feel. The colors follow mostly golden hues when dealing with, the colonists and their history. This mirrors the golden hue of the art of the particular Phase of “The High Republic,” of which these people are a product. When it’s just the Rebels it switches to green, a pattern used in this series before. Because of this, the backgrounds tend to be a bit boring. However, that allows the characters to be bright in contrast and pop out on the page, Holdo especially with her purple hair. This has become less of a problem as the series has gone on.

As the timeline approaches Return of the Jedi, the characters resemble entirely their movie counterparts: Luke is in his black Jedi robes, Lando in his shirt and cape from the film, and Leia is in an outfit that looks similar to the one she will wear on Endor, but colored red like a Naboo guard, a nice touch in its own right.