STAR WARS: X-WING Rogue Squadron - The Phantom Affair
by Stackpole, Macan and Biukovic
BOXTREE Graphic Novel £11.99, IBSN 0-7522-0149-2
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The Rebel Alliance sends Wedge Antilles and Rogue Squadron to the Mrisst Academy to bid on a powerful new war technology, a miniaturized cloaking device. But Wedge Antilles wasn't counting on facing an Imperial counter-bidder, much less Loka Hask, the one-time space pirate responsible for the death of his parents!
The bargaining table remains neutral ground, but as Rogue Squadron is framed for crimes they didn't commit, they discover that an active Academy campus can be a hotbed of intrigue, sabotage, murder… and rebellion!
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REVIEW (from Kimota #8)
This graphic novel collects together four Star Wars comics originally published by Dark Horse comics. The series takes a minor Rebel Alliance character from the Star Wars films, Wedge Antilles and gives him a history and his own story. As a friend of Luke Skywalker and involved in both the Death Star raid and on Endor, Wedge is as dashing an Alliance hero as the major stars. In this book this story continues after Endor as he takes his ‘Rogue Squadron’ on Alliance business and gets into trouble with the Imperial Empire.
This story is the first of a series and concerns a new weapon developed by a university planet. Wedge and his team consisting of six X-wing pilots and a wookie called Groznik. Problems occur when Imperialist sympathisers deny that the battle of Endor ever happened and the Emperor is still alive. Worse still an Imperial negotiator arrives to bit for the weapon - a new small cloaked fighter called The Phantom. The imperial representative turns out to be Wedge’s arch enemy - the pirate who killed his parents! As if all this wasn’t enough there is a ghost Jedi night haunting the campus.
Through exciting twists and turns of plot, this story keeps you interested and by a number of one-liners scattered throughout, is quite funny to. The artwork is bright and colourful depicting the characters in a style between cartoon and realistic, which works well for this story. It also achieves the difficult task of making a group of humans distinguishable from each other. It’s a pain in the neck when you thing something’s happening to one character only to find out it was someone completely different.
The story may seem a bit one sided, but that is Star Wars, Good and Evil and very little blurring, even when those evil ones tell vicious lies about our heroes. Finding the gaps in the films to explore the minor characters is an indigenous idea and works well to keep the Star Wars fans satisfied until the next film comes out.
Graeme Hurry
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