Doug WheatleyCritiques

Only read the Avatar half of the comic. The Briggs Land half did not appeal at all.

Art was great with excellent colouring. But I've not seen the film and this did nothing to help my understanding or make me want to read/ watch more.

Only read the Avatar half of the comic. The Briggs Land half did not appeal at all.

Art was great with excellent colouring. But I've not seen the film and this did nothing to help my understanding or make me want to read/ watch more.

A nice quick read that takes place right after the Clone Wars as the Emperor and Darth Vader are consolidating power. One of the last Jedi and his captain survive one of the last stands of the Separatists. Yes, the Jedi was fighting for the Separatists, having been forced to seek their help with the clones turn on him due to Order 66. The captain's wife and daughter are taken as prisoners and to be sold as slaves, and it is up to the Jedi and him to try to find them. In the meantime, we have Vader coming more into his role as Dark Lord of the Sith and the Emperor's enforcer. Slowly for him, certain realities are starting to sink in. If some of the Darth Vader stuff seems familiar, some of it does come out of Luceno's novel Dark Lord Rising. Personally, I found the Vader parts compelling, but then again, I read the novel too, which I did enjoy. The main story was pretty good, though it seemed to run a bit fast at the end, as if the author was trying to wrap it up nicely at the end, so to speak. Anyhow, this is the first volume of a series, and I will probably seek out others since I do like reading Star Wars material, especially when it takes place in smaller settings and stories like this one. The book is a nice, quick read, but at times, I did wish it had a bit more depth.

Found it at my local public library. In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that while I am a Star Wars fan, I am not too thrilled with the new films.

Anyhow, see my short note on the book:

[http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/12/short-notes-on-graphic-novels-8.html]

This volume draws some of the threads of Dark Times together as the series comes to an end. Finally reunited with the Uhumele, Dass Jennir plots an ambush for the mysterious Darth Vader. There's even a callback to the original story in Clone Wars, Volume 9 from which Dark Times sprang.

It's fine. I liked the resolution to what was going on with the Verpine Jedi, and Wheatley's art is good, even though it's not as good as it was. Darth Vader and the Empire aren't quite the inevitable force they ought to be, but I think my biggest issue is less with something Dark Times did and more with something it didn't.

The earlier volumes, I think, were pointing at something unique, asking what it means to be a Jedi in dark times? The answer A Spark Remains gives us is that it's not all that different. Which is a good message, one supposes, but maybe too pat. I also think Bomo Greenbark and the Uhumele crew ultimately ended up squandered; after volume 3, they didn't contribute very much to the main thrust of the series any more. Greenbark was originally an ordinary guy crushed by war and spat out, and I liked that. But here's, he's just another guy on the ship. I wish his character had ended up being as important to the series as Jennir's, which is what the earlier volumes had implied would be the case.

All in all, I enjoyed Dark Times. It's no Knights of the Old Republic or Legacy, but it is a valuable reminder of the kind of interesting smaller-scale side stories about "ordinary" people in the Star Wars universe that Dark Horse was good at.

Darth Vader has been a background presence throughout Dark Times, rarely directly interacting with Our Heroes, but lurking off somewhere else, sometimes as frustrated as they are with the new state of the galaxy. In this volume, Dass Jennir sets off to return Ember, the brothel manager he met in the last volume, to her home planet, only to end up crash-landing. The two must work together to survive while being hunted by a bounty hunter, and while the Uhumele crew searches for Jennir with the aid of a Verpine Jedi. It's not the best volume of Dark Times, but it is enjoyable enough.

I'm not entirely convinced by the Jennir/Ember romance, which mostly seems to be based on her being female and willing and him being lonely and needy, but the basic premise of the story is sound. I like Jennir's pretty consistent "hero" moments; it's a good demonstration of the constant commitment to goodness in difficult circumstances that the Jedi life requires, and for Jennir, the Dark Times seem to be providing some clarity that his earlier life lacked. The galaxy might be worse off, but he seems to be more himself than he ever was. There's a good twist as regards the bounty hunter, too. I do wish it didn't seem like Bomo Greenbark was fading into the background, though; his ordinariness was one of the original drivers of the series, but he's just kind of becoming yet another member of the Uhumele crew.

I like Wheatley's artwork, but I liked his art better in the earlier volumes of this series. It was more rounded and 3-D then, to good effect.

With this volume of Dark Times, I hit the point where I fell behind as the series was coming out, so everything from here onwards is new to me. Blue Harvest shifts the focus away from the crew of the Uhumele and Darth Vader (who both appear for just a couple pages), back to ex-Jedi Dass Jennir, who we last saw in volume one. It's okay stuff, but predictable, reminding me a little bit of a western, a little bit of noir.

Jennir is asked by a woman to help clear her town of gangs; of course it's a set-up (though not one I entirely understood), but also of course he manages it anyway. It doesn't have the painful darkness that made some of the earlier volumes of Dark Times work. You don't feel that Jennir is being pushed to the limit of his morality as he has been in the past. Still, I enjoyed it; it has nice touches, like Jennir inheriting the droid of a man he killed, so the droid is always grumbling at him about it, and the local fisherman named simply "Fish" who loyally aids Jennir. I'm over halfway through Dark Times now, so hopefully the series ends on a high note.

I initially didn't like the title, but a commenter on my blog helped me understand it's a double reference to Star Wars and to Dashiell Hammett, and it kind of is a Hammett novel transposed into the Star Wars universe, so I like it now.

Slogging. Writing not near as adept as others in the series. Too much tell, not enough show.

Star wars is one of my favorire books to read because the plot settings and the story is just perfect ome years after Episode II, the Clone Wars reach a climax. After the evil cyborg General Grievous kidnaps Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in a daring raid, it’s up to Obi-Wan and Anakin to save the day. Amid a vicious space battle around Coruscant, the Jedi board the cornered Separatist command ship to save their leader. There, Anakin and Obi-Wan have their final duel with Count Dooku. Unfortunately Anakin taps into the Dark Side to defeat his enemy. It ends up being his first major step in becoming Darth Vader.if you really like to know more about the story , i recommend you to read it.

Dark Times have indeed come to a galaxy far, far away. The Empire is ascendant, and after Order 66 has been implemented, it is a bad time to be a Jedi. This book captures the feeling of those times. The artwork is on the realistic side (even when the characters are various humanoid/animal-ish aliens) and the coloring is subdued and natural, both a step away from the more colorful, more animated artwork you will see in other comics, Knights of the Old Republic, for example. Douglas Wheatley manages to capture expressions on alien faces very well. For instance, Bomo Greenbark's stunned expression when he learns his family has been sold into slavery by the Empire. Basically, I can't say enough good things about the art in this first volume of Dark Times. The story is also compelling. The time is soon after Anakin Skywalker has been transformed into Darth Vader, and even though his face is literally a mask, you can still tell that he is coming to grips with his actions and his new role as a servant of his master, the Emperor. There are a number of brief flashbacks to the prequel movies, which act as a nice connector between the Darth Vader from the original movies and the prequels. These are Dark Times for Vader, certainly. And for Jedi Dass Jennir, who must hide what he is due to Order 66, he must come to grips with what it means to be a Jedi (or not) in this new era.

This is not a happy story, as the title implies, but it is a riveting story combined with good artwork, and introduces a slew of interesting characters that I want to learn more about.

I expected to like this new series a lot, spinning off as it did from the very good last volume of the Clone Wars comics, Endgame. Unfortunately, this volume never clicked with me for some reason. There's nothing I can point to, really, but there is a feeling of seen-it-before, with a Jedi on the run in a rag-tag ship, in danger of falling to the dark side-- it's Knights of the Old Republic mixed with Quinlan Vos's arc in Clone Wars, except not as good as either. One review I read online said that the story Endgame set up-- a Jedi leading an army of former Separatists against the Empire-- was more interesting than the one we actually got, and I agree. Still, the art is very, very nice, and the twilight gloom that arrives with the coming of the Empire is well portrayed. I think I'll pick up the second volume and see how I like it then.

added January 2019:
I read the first three volumes of Dark Times-- which chronicles the separate adventures of a couple Jedi, a group of smugglers, and Darth Vader in the months after Revenge of the Sith-- as they came out in the late 2000s, but fell behind after that; the series lasted four more. I finally got to reading volume four, but decided I ought to reread the earlier volumes so I would have some context. (First, I actually reread a two-issue story in Clone Wars, Volume 9 that some of the Dark Times characters debuted in.)

On reread, I actually liked it more than the above indicates, maybe because I knew to not have those expectations based on Endgame anymore, and maybe also because since I read it right after Endgame, the continuity of Dass Jennir's character arc was more obvious. Jennir isn't in danger of falling to the Dark Side, as I said above; it's more than in the era of the Empire, the ideals that sustained his entire life just ceased to be applicable. He's not choosing evil, but moving into a world where there is no opportunity to choose good. This is a very dark comic book (slavery and cannibalism are key features!), but it takes good advantage of its setting to tell a unique kind of Star Wars story, and it does so very well, in large part thanks to Douglas Wheatley's exceptional artwork.

(Since the original comic came out, it's been revealed that "Welles Hartley," credited writer of Endgame, and "Mick Harrison," credited writer of volumes 2-4 of Dark Times, are in fact both pen names for editor Randy Stradley, used I guess to disguise how much of Dark Horse's Star Wars output he wrote himself. But for some reason this book credits the story to one of those pseudonyms and the script to the other! In this interview from 2007, artist Wheatley even keeps up the subterfuge by saying it's the first project he's ever worked on with two writers, and it makes for lively conference calls. This has bothered me ever since the Hartley/Harrison revelation, and I want to know why it was done this way.)