X-Wing Rogue Squadron #17 [Requiem for a Rogue (Part 1 of 4)]

Reviewed 06/17/97: reviews issues #17 - #19 (Parts 1-3) Story The Rogue Squadron is sent on a mission to find a lost ship of Bothan Tourists. Upon arriving at the coordinates, a dogfight with some TIEs causes Wedge to crash in the forest. The rest of the squad finds the missing Bothan ship, but the Bothans seem more like mercenaries than tourists. Dllr senses the planet's "music", which we learn comes from an abandoned Sith temple commanded by a former Imperial tech who learned its Sith power. He now commands the native beasts whom attach the Bothans and the Rogues. He captured Wedge who was able to escape due to his Force insensitivity. Drawn to the temple, Dllr is captured and is forced to embrace Sith power in order to save himself and the rest of the Rogues. Obviously, Stackpole has a good understanding of these characters since he invented most of them. The plot is fine, but isn't exactly gripping me. One problem I have is the over use of Sith power in the post-ROTJ fiction. I get my share of it from KJA and I don't really need it here. As a computer programmer, I didn't buy the transposition bug at the start of the arc. Generally, computers don't store numbers as a string of digits (eg: "247") especially for numerical computation (which is presumably all navigation software does). As such, the only place transposition errors would occur is at the time of user input where a number is translated to its internal format. If there were this kind of bug, it wouldn't be random. (That said, my software has seen many bugs I would have thought impossible.) Art In general, the pencils in this book are very good. The characters and settings are all done very well, with an impressive level of detail. My one beef here would be the pencils in the dogfights (an important aspect of any X-Wing title). For some reason, people can't seem to draw TIEs correctly. On many occasions, the panels are out of proportion or too close/far to the cockpit or at the wrong angel. I just don't understand this. The X-Wings are better, but not always right either. The color, on the other hand, has no flaws. It's amazing from the texture of the gunfire to the glow in the back of the forest to the blur effect on ships in the distance. Absolutely beautiful. On par with the colors in the HTTE series. Summary Great colors, average pencils, average story. 7/10. Recommended.
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