The Last Siege, The Final Truth (Clone Wars volume 8)

Warning: Star Wars geekery follows. If you aren’t interested in Star Wars details, move along. Nothing to see here. This is not the review you were looking for.

Of all the of various written Star Wars tie-ins, the best are probably the series of Clone Wars comics produced by Dark Horse. They’re being released in graphic novel form. Volume 8 – The Last Siege, The Final Truth – is the latest volume. The series as a whole consists of a number of different shorter threads as well as a few longer threads. Several of the earlier volumes, for example, followed the Jedis’ encounters with Asajj Ventress, a key follower of Dooku through part of the Clone Wars. The other major thread follows Quinlan Vos, a Jedi whose master, Tholme (who sort of acts as spy master for the Jedi) has sent him undercover, to penetrate Dooku’s organization and possibly uncover the identity of the second Sith.

What makes this sequence – and the whole 8^th volume focuses on it – so good is the character of Vos. Vos struggles with the dark side and for much of the sequence it’s not clear whether he’s going to give into the Dark Side and join Dooku. He’s a dark brooding character, full of anger. This anger, like Anakin’s, is early on aimed at ending the war. Like Anakin, he is faced with choices where he can do awful things that may (or at least it seems to him) lead to better things. This ambiguity lends a lot of tension to the story and deepens the character of Vos.

The story itself involves an attempt by the Separatists to create their own clone army, this one created from a race of assassins. They are doing this deep beneath the planet Saleucami. A Jedi-led clone army lays a siege on the planet, while strike teams try to sneak in and disable force shields and the planetary defense system. Vos, leading the strike teams, has in own motivation. The Dark Jedi Sora Bulq, who Vos is convinced is the second Sith, is there supervising the creation of the clone/assassin army. Vos wants to sneak in and kill him: he thinks this will end the war and justify all he’s had to do until this point.

In the end, Vos faces the same decision that Anakin had to face. In this case, though, there are other Jedi near, including his former Padwan, who talk to him and assure him as he is about to go over the edge (something Anakin did not have, since the only two Jedi who could have had such an affect on him were fighting on the outer rim), which pulls him back. He returns to the light, though of course somewhat disillusioned since, of course, Sora Bulq is not the second Sith.

A good graphic novel. There’s one more in the series, due out later this year, and I’m looking forward to it.