I have been on a serious Star Wars kick the last few weeks. I’ve been absolutely loving The Mandalorian on Disney+, and Jedi: Fallen Order is one of my favorite video games in years, and probably the best Star Wars game I’ve ever played. I’ve been rewatching all of the films (in in-universe chronological order) in advance of the end of the Skywalker saga, as well as starting rewatches of both Clone Wars and Rebels (along with teaching myself to read Aurebesh, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages). And I’ve been inspired to go back and revisit stuff that I might have overlooked. For example, after learning that the Fallen Order video game had a lot of connections to the second volume of Marvel’s Darth Vader comic from 2017, I realized that the series had gone on for more issues than I realized and I hadn’t finished reading the whole thing the first time around. With scripts by Charles Soule and art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, the 25-issue long run ended up being one of my favorite Star Wars stories of recent memory, with the final issue being absolutely staggeringly good. (And now I’m rereading the first volume by Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca, which is every bit as good as I remembered.)
I’ve also been working my way through the various prose tie-in novels in the “Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” line in the run-up to the new flick, and last night finished reading Rebecca Roanhorse’s Resistance Reborn. The novel picks up shortly after the events of The Last Jedi, with the few surviving members of the Resistance fleeing from the First Order onboard the Millennium Falcon in a desperate search for new allies and safe harbor. The story is very well constructed, and I feel like Roanhorse does a spectacular job of capturing the voices and personalities of the various characters. And one of the things I enjoyed most about reading it was seeing characters that I had first encountered in video games (Battlefront II, to be precise), comics (primarily Poe Dameron, again by Charles Soule), and even other novels (Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy and Claudia Grey’s Bloodline, in particular) interacting with characters from the films. It made that world seem even more like a cohesive whole, and I was left feeling like any one of these characters could appear in The Rise of Skywalker and fit in perfectly with the live action cast.
If you’ve ever enjoyed a Star Wars prose novel, I strongly recommend checking out Resistance Reborn. It’s an extremely enjoyable read, and left me even more excited to see The Rise of Skywalker in a few weeks than I was already.