Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm

Dawn of the Jedi: a Star Wars story released just when I – and many others – was starting to doubt the franchise, and for a lot of reasons.  But there were also a lot of reasons to feel…a new hope…

This essay really says all that I have to say on the outside.  I had really all but given up on Star Wars at the point that I purchased Dawn of the Jedi.  I came across a really good sale on books and I bought Force Storm, Into the Void and several other books.  If these books had sucked, I might have stopped right there.  That was how I was feeling, and why I had gone since Apocalypse within paying attention to any new releases.  Thankfully, Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm was good, and while Into the Void wasn’t quite to that level, it was good too.  I’m still here.

I was a little skeptical when Dawn of the Jedi was announced.  It came out right around a time that I was feeling a bit disillusioned by Star Wars.  Decisions by writers and editors for Del Rey, decisions involved in the writing of The Clone Wars, ultimately I was feeling like the Star Wars that had been the better part of a decade of my life was over.  I’ve also always had a bit of skepticism about Star Wars comics, not because Dark Horse has ever dropped the ball, but because there’s generally more Star Wars Dark Horse releases in a year than paychecks.  Read the overview here.

Dawn of the Jedi starts off with a deus ex machina, a squadron of eight ships traveling the galaxy to collect Force-sensitive individuals and bring them to one place.  I wanted to complain about this, but the fact of the matter is, this is during the heyday of the Rakatan Infinite Empire and the wane of the influence of the Celestials.  The fact of the matter is that this sort of shit happened all the time in this era of galactic history.  While I do feel that this sequence will be a lot stronger if the creative team explains what happened at some point, this matches well enough with established history that to complain about this would require me to take issue with the existence of Corellian humans.  Read the review here.

Dawn of the Jedi is the earliest part in Star Wars continuity; in fact, it s the closest thing to “dawn of civilization” that we are likely to get for a galaxy-spanning civilization.  And as such, it introduces things to the Star Wars mythos, but nothing that changes the game forever.  Still, it made decisions that tied things in the Star Wars universe together in unexpected ways.  Read the analysis here.