Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures #6 // Review
Some time has passed. There have been delays. Now, those delays are well in the past, and Dark Horse Comics is ready to wrap up Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures with three issues that are all released on the same day. Padawan Sav Malagán returns for the end of her quest to save Maz Kanata from the Dank Graks. Writer Daniel José Older continues the story into its sixth issue with artist Harvey Tolibao. Color embellishes the artist's work courtesy of Michael Atiyeh. It’s a fast-paced lead-in to the penultimate issue in the series that features some beautiful renderings of Star Wars-style fighter and blaster combat.
Saya isn’t being entirely truthful. She and an undercover Sav are in the rubble-strewn streets of the market district in Jedha City. It’s another random turn down some unknown street. Given the state of the place, anyone would have trouble finding their way around. Time is running out. They’re no closer to finding Maz. Sav threatens to return to the Eviscerator. It might be a bluff. It might not. It works in any case. Saya is ready to talk. Finding the location of Maz is only the start of Sav’s troubles, though...
Older could almost be said to be padding out the series with this issue. There is a bit of action moving the plot forward that does advance the relationship between Sav and Saya, but Older seems to be dragging things out so that the journey to Mav can last just a little bit longer. Not that that’s a bad thing at all. Older does a really good job of modulating Star Wars-style action on a variety of different levels. Set during the era of the High Republic, there isn’t a whole lot in the series that feels totally Star Wars-like, but Older does a good job of firmly articulating a multi-angle adventure that is drawn right out of the classic era of the franchise.
There might not be a whole lot to the look of the series that feels universally Star Wars-y, but there’s something distinctly familiar about the way that the Force, the blasters, and the spacecraft move. Tolibao finds brilliantly-defined, little static images that manage to capture the spirit, tone, motion, and aggression that are unmistakably Star Wars. The pulpy space adventure shoots across the page with impressive detail in places. The many lines in Tolibao’s rendering saturate page and panel without ever slowing down the rush of the action.
When they were working on the series, Older and company would not have been anticipating the kind of tremendous lag between issues that they ended up facing. If they did anticipate a long wait for the current issue, they couldn’t have come up with a better return to the story than the rush of Issue #6. It almost feels like they planned for the lag. The story glides well from opening cliffhanger to closing cliffhanger with ease and poise.
