Crimson Empire #5 (of 6)

Story: Mike Richardson, Randy Stradley
Pencils: Paul Gulacy
Inks: P Craig Russell
Colors: Dave Stewart
Editor: Diana Schutz

Rogue Squadron arrives to thwart the Imperial attack. Jax chases Kanos to Yinchorr, the planet of their first meeting. Reviewed 04/05/98 Story When we last left this series, I was shuddering in my chair imagining the potential damage that could be done by dragging the Rogue Squadron into this mess. In what started a trend for this issue... it wasn't as bad as I had imagined. The appearance is brief and cameo-like and can safely be ignored by all future X-Wing projects. (Pilots names are completely left out to help ensure this.) While I certainly can't claim to be chief of the continuity police, the fact that they're in B-Wings and E-Wings bothers me here. I think that Wedge's post on Lusankya can be worked out in the timeline, but it doesn't feel natural. From here, I actually found myself enjoying Kanos' Trojan Horse trick in that it at least made me feel Jax has more than his outfit going for him. I also enjoyed the assault on Kanos sequence as a way to get the reader to like the protagonist (though in subsequent readings I decided a several page reprieve from lame dialog was the big plus). Unfortunately, the last pages reminded me that I've known the story for issue #6 after reading a few panels of issue #0. Art Overall, I do not care for the art in this series. The style is simply not to my liking and I don't think anything can be done about it. You can see my past reviews for specific complaints. However, because this issue is an improvement over previous issues... I'll let you know of a few things that were done well. Gulacy does a wonderful job of drawing Star Destroyers (though the Alliance symbols seemed pretty cheesy), as well as Imperial Shuttles to a slightly lesser extent. The color work on the starfields, planets and fire effects are great. The only new problems were Wedge's likeness to Denis Lawson (to be fair, this is clearly not a priority of the art team) and the use of pilot's uniforms for the Stormtroopers attacking Kanos. (I assume this was a choice made for more interesting visuals rather than to imply that they sent in TIE pilots for hand to hand combat.) Lettercol Does anyone else find it suspicious that we're five issues in and no letters have been printed about issue #2 or later? The natural answer is that deadlines didn't allow it and that the #0 issues needed to be covered. While that's reasonable, it's seeming more and more likely to me that there simply isn't that much rosy glowing mail about the most recent issues. Conclusions While I can't recommend it, it's an improvement over previous installments. 6/10.
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