Product Description

Thousands of years before Luke Skywalker would destroy the Death Star in that fateful battle above Yavin 4, one lone Padawan would become a fugitive hunted by his own Masters, charged with murdering every one of his fellow Jedi-in-training! From criminals hiding out in the treacherous under-city of the planet Taris, to a burly, mysterious droid recovered from the desolate landscape of a cratered moon, Padawan Zayne Carrick will find unexpected allies in his desperate race to clear his name before the unmerciful authorities enact swift retribution upon him!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13566 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up—On the opening page of this compilation, readers are reminded that "The events in this story take place approximately 3,964 years before the Battle of Yavin." Even though the action occurs before the traditional Star Wars saga, those familiar only with the first Star Wars characters won't feel lost: these stories are peopled with characters that represent the same worlds and situations laid down in the original framework. Zayne Carrick is one of five padawan who are about to take part in a ceremony to see which of them will be knighted, and Zayne thinks he has no chance because he is totally inept. The Mandolorian War is heating up and the Jedi council is split on whether to join or not. It is an exciting time and about to get more so. The "Knights of the Old Republic" stories explore the motives and reasoning that add a gray area to the black and white, good and bad, of Jedi versus Sith that the original stories lack. The artwork is colorful and kinetic. This book is a thrill ride not to be missed, a nonstop action story that will captivate readers.—Dana Cobern-Kullman, Luther Burbank Middle School, Burbank, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

GREAT STORY
When you read this novel it will begin to give you a fuller story of Star Wars, its not as simple as Bad and Good.

KOTOR
I played the KOTOR game and loved it, So when I heard they were making a comic book that was going to take place during the mandalorian wars I was very excited. This comic is different enough from the game to be a separate story, but still have that KOTOR feeling. I really enjoyed reading it and will probably start collecting the comics.

More dumb Jedi in an otherwise well-done retread
It seems no one is able to come up with a fresh angle on Star Wars.

Here we have a new series set four millennia prior to the Anakin/Luke saga, a wonderful opportunity to do something different, to try on some new clothes, to even do an extensive makeover. What we get is a rearrangement of the essential elements: a Jedi-centric story featuring a white teenage boy set in the midst of a galaxy-wide war populated with the same old species playing the same tired roles.

The story is the film prequel in reverse. Our "hero," Zayne Carrick, is the evil chosen one, a padawan feared by a secret group of Jedi seers to be the next Sith Lord. Framing Carrick for murder, the Jedi cabal intends to arrest and then liquidate him - and all on a very flimsy pretense. In a seance-like trance, the seers have a joint vision of a Sith in a red suit. And, by gosh, Garrick has a red environment suit that looks eerily similar, in a trance induced dream-like way. Even George Bush had more credible evidence for his adventure in Iraq.

Zayne turns the tables by escaping and promising to hunt down every last one of the seers in order to clear his name. So rather than a chosen one who turns out to be the Jedi's nemesis, we have a supposed Sith Lord who appears set to save the Jedi - and the universe.

Admittedly, this is a clever plotting twist and not the only surprise writer John Jackson Miller has up his sleeve. In fact, given the warmed-over flavor of the concept, it's Miller's scripting and plotting chops that rescue the series from utter mediocrity. Besides a sharp wit and deft sense of comic timing, his writing is crisp and cinematic, with no exposition to slow the pace of events. He's aided and abetted by Brian Ching's pencils, some very sharp art that is sorely missed in Travel Forman's anime-style fifth chapter.

To be fair, Dark Horse and Miller may not be entirely to blame for the repackaged characters and plot devices. With two best-selling video games built around this era, Lucas Arts no doubt also had a say. While you need not have played the games to enjoy these comics, it might help if you haven't read or watched too much Star Wars. For those that have, you can play spot-the-retread:

+ Jedi obsessed with the reappearance, after a long period of inactivity, of the Sith
+ A Jedi council that despite its collection of big brains doesn't have a collective idea of what goes on among its members
+ Yoda leading the Jedi academy (actually, he has another name and a little more hair, but otherwise he's Yoda)
+ The Jedi council chamber looking the same as 1000 years later
+ A junk heap of a ship that breaks down at inopportune moments
+ Spaceships escaping pursuit in asteroid fields
+ Self-absorbed drifters and shady merchants who abandon the hero, only to return to rescue him from certain death

While Star Wars fans have come to expect this kind of patchwork storytelling in the EU, it would be of great service to the Star Wars universe as a whole if writers didn't borrow every latest addition and shoe-horn it into stories set in the far past. It makes for a static universe. In Commencement, for example, we have a Jedi talking about the "Living Force," a concept first introduced through Qui Gon Jinn. By the time it appears now in The Phantom Menace it is a tired and perhaps even trite conception. The same goes for "Shatterpoint," from the Clone Wars novel of the same name. Mace Windu's ability to perceive the universe as a woven object with points of stress, weakness, vulnerabilities - shatterpoints - is as a result of the millennial retrofit now stripped of any special associations with Windu or the Clone Wars. This same process of over-drawing from the idea-bank applies as well to species. One of Commencement's minor characters, a restaurant manager, is a Besalisk, who fans know most commonly as the four-armed biped Dex, the diner proprietor from Attack of the Clones. Besides robbing this species of a history that might have involved being discovered in the four thousand years between KOTOR and the Clone Wars, the Besalisk are now under threat for the next four millennia of being relegated to service in the food and beverage industry.

Miller and Dark Horse aren't the only ones guilty of this kind of clumsy universe crafting and I mention it here only because this volume offers a few choice examples. Despite its flaws, though, Commencement is a better than average comic and a lot more entertaining than the current novel series, Legacy of the Force. I'm looking forward to the next chapter - and hoping to see a little more originality.

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