Star Wars Bounty Hunters #3: I Like This Kind of Scum

A lot of times sci-fi comics can get bogged down in their own continuity and lose the reader in their own “universe”. Thankfully, that’s not the case with Star Wars Bounty Hunters #3. If you’ve never read the title before, you’ll enjoy this as if you had (but I’d really consider picking up the first two issues if you don’t already have them). Author Ethan Sacks writes an incredibly accessible story, not to mention a really entertaining one. We get really deep inside the different Bounty Hunter “clans” and their mission of getting revenge on a member who had betrayed them in the past. Saks does a couple of things that I really dig this issue, the first being that he has the characters acting like actual bounty hunters. Individuals who tend to look out mostly for themselves and will step over anybody to get what they’re after. The second was that this is a story that takes place on more than one planet. Sci-fi stories sometimes tend to take place on one planet. As everyone knows, usually Star Wars stories planet-hop several times within one single tale.

The art by Paolo Villanelli is simply put, amazing. He captures the look, feel and mood of the Star Wars universe so well. There’s plenty of recognizable things in this issue, but the things/people/places he creates look like they’ve’ been ripped right off the set of a Star Wars movie we’ve never seen. There are a really good amount of twists and turns in this issue, and Villanelli is great at drawing reactions on faces. And some of these are faces that don’t actually exist. Bossk had about 1 second of screen time in The Empire Strikes Back, so please ex[lain to me how Villanelli manages to draw a convincing look of anger on a made-up lizard man’s face? Talent, plain & simple, that’s how. The talent level on this book makes it really hard for this title to have an “off” issue.