Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren #1 Fills In Some Blanks That No One Ever Wondered About (Review)
The ups and downs of Star Wars since Disney took over should be studied. While many Star Wars fans out there will tell you that everything is terrible, the truth is that things are more in the middle. There’s good stuff and bad stuff, like anything else. The sequel trilogy gets a lot of flack, but it doesn’t always deserve it and a big reason for that is Kylo Ren. Played by Adam Driver, Kylo Ren was the dark heart of the trilogy, his parts of the movies always being the most entertaining and interesting. Ren has been dead for years, but has had quite a second life in the comics; in fact, we’ve gotten to the point where if you want great Star Wars media in general, you go to the comic store.
Ren is back in comics with Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren, a miniseries from writer Charles Soule, who has been killing it on Marvel’s Star Wars offerings, and artist Will Sliney. The first issue takes readers to the days before Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, as Ren deals with being the leader of the First Order and his new relationships with his subordinates. While this issue is well-paced, this book never really finds a way to make readers care about the story.
Rating: 2 out of 5
| Pros | Cons |
| The book’s pacing keeps it from getting boring | No one ever really questioned what happened between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, so there’s really no reason for this book to exist |
| Sliney does a great job rendering the ships | Sliney tries to make Ren look like Driver, but there’s something off about it |
| Star Wars-style space battles just don’t work well in comics and a lot of this book is space battle |
Soule Tries to Find an Interesting Story but Can Never Get There
Charles Soule came to Marvel in 2014 and had some lackluster years writing Marvel superheroes before moving over to the Star Wars comics. Soule has basically salvaged his career in the galaxy far, far away, giving readers numerous amazing stories. He’s proven to be adroit with Kylo Ren, writing Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren, which put more focus on the character’s origin. Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren is a sister book to that one, taking place at the point where Ren started to guarantee his own downfall, before Rise of Skywalker. While that could be a cool story, Soule is never able to get this first issue off the ground.
I think one of the biggest problems for me is that no one ever asked to see the stuff between TLJ and RoS. I’m not going to go into a sequel trilogy diatribe, but the JJ Abrams chapters of the trilogy aren’t complex movies; at the beginning of RoS, we were told that Ren was the leader and was fighting harder and that made sense. In fact, we saw it. It worked; there were no reasons to ask questions because the movie gave us everything we needed to know. There’s really no reason to focus on the months where he led the war against the remnants of the Republic and Soule isn’t really able to find a way to make this anything but cliche. Did we really need to see more of why, for example, Hux and Pryde didn’t like each other? Was that some burning question everyone had? Flashback books like this need to convince readers they should exist and that never happens. Nothing in this issue is new and none of it is exciting enough where it’s a must read. If you like Ren and the sequels, you won’t hate the book, but you’re not going to remember it very long afterwards.
Sliney’s Art Has Its Ups and Downs
Sliney was the artist for Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren, so him returning for this sequel works rather well. However, that’s not to say the art in this issue is amazing. We’ll start with the pluses; the ships actually look like they should, which has been a problem for Star Wars comics. Seriously, go back and read some of the Dark Horse books and then take a look at this one. It looks fantastic, which is important because a lot of the book is basically space battle. Sliney’s figure work and character acting is pretty good, getting across the emotion of the scenes. His Hux and Pryde both look like their actors and it doesn’t feel uncanny. What little character action this book has is pretty fluid and well laid out.
While the ships look amazing, that’s pretty much the only thing that works about the art of the space battle. This isn’t Sliney’s fault; big Star Wars-style space battles look amazing on the screen, but in a static medium, they just don’t work well. There’s no sense of motion and the battle itself is kind of boring. While Sliney does well with Hux and Pryde, his Adam Driver-esque Ren does not look good at all. There’s just something about the angles of the face when the shot isn’t straight on. It’s not bad per say, but it kept taking me out of the story. Sliney’s art works at some points and not at others, but I don’t really blame him for that. This just isn’t that good of a script and he could only do so much to make it work.
I’m not super into the sequel trilogy, but I always liked Kylo Ren. He’s a classic Star Wars character, a person who fell to darkness and is full of doubt. There’s a lot to love about him and I was hoping to find some of that in this comic. However, it never really got there. This book doesn’t reveal anything new about anything, which hurts it a lot. It fails as a flashback comic for this reason. There’s barely even a hook to get readers to come back. This issue is sold entirely on the merits of it being Star Wars, because there’s nothing else interesting to it.
Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren #1 is on sale now.
