Writer: Rodney Barnes
Artist: Ramon Rosanas
Marvel Comics, September 2024
With characters introduced in the television series Obi-wan Kenobi, here comes Inquisitors, a new four comic published by Marvel Comics, written by Rodney Barnes and with art by Ramon Rosanos. This review, as with the comic, contains a number of assumptions on the reader’s understanding of the Star Wars mythos. Some of it is nonsensical to the uninitiated. If you have not seen the many movies, the cartoon spin-offs, and the television series, odds are you will not follow this critique.
The Inquisitors are the work-around for the established Star Wars lore than there can only ever be two Sith Lords. The Inquisitors are sort of quasi-Sith, using the Sith Lords’ trademark red lightsabers, dressed in black, and wielding the dark side of the Force. Darth Vadar takes his commitment to the colour scheme to an extreme extent: he sits on a black throne in a black citadel surrounded by burning lava. There is not much of that here: most of the landscapes in Inquisitors #1 are pastoral and described by the characters as beautiful places. While not the natural habitat of followers of the dark side of the Force, they seem to be handy locales for runaway Jedi knights.
Despite not being Sith Lords, in this issue we see the Grand Inquisitor, a former Jedi knight who has turned to the dark side, easily carving up four Jedis at once. (Perhaps Obi-Wan Kenobi’s vengeance upon Darth Maul, an acrobatic Sith Lord who was a step-up from an Inquisitor, in the motion picture The Phantom Menace was a bit too lucky.) The Grand Inquisitor establishes himself in this issue as a formidable adversary.
There’s a remarkable lack of violence in this first issue. There are many murders, but they are all off-panel. The Grand Inquisitor orders the deaths of all adults in a peaceful agricultural village on the planet Targyon, but not a single body is to be seen. And when the Grand Inquisitor executes retired Jedi Master Elan, all we see is a detached cyborg foot thrown across the ground. It seems very child-friendly. (We even get the sound effects “Pew Pew!”) Marvel and Lucasfilms (the repository of Star Wars intellectual property) are each subsidiaries of Disney. Disney was once an exclusive enclave of content for children. Perhaps Disney has issued a directive to Marvel and writer Rodney Barnes to cool it on the overt violence. Or perhaps in an age when Russia is engaging in ethnic cleansing in western Ukraine involving the kidnapping of orphaned children, a scene where the children of Targyon are depicted witnessing their parents’ murders and then rounded up to be sent to the evil Galactic Empire’s headquarters on Coruscent is a bit too close to reality. Ramon Rosanas’ pleasing (if slightly stiff) art spares us blaster exit wounds and lightsaber decapitations. It is far removed from the grittiness of the Andor television series and the Rogue One motion picture, let alone the grim themes in Star Wars #6 (2020) where the Inquisitor was left to burn alive, but not permitted to die, by a dismissive Darth Vadar.
Mr Barnes has also done something curious given his background. Mr Barnes is, as his website http://www.rodneybarnes.com notes, “…showrunner/writer/creator of Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, a TV show based on Michael Bennett’s book of the same name in development with John Wells at HBO Max” and “actively participates on the speaking circuit, discussing his career, the media landscape, cultural/race issues, and comic book culture.” Yet Mr Barnes has decided to introduce new character Tensu Run, a white Jedi Knight, in the cultural tradition of the Great White Hope – a white man in a work of Anglophone fiction inevitably saving the day. (We have discussed this in our review of White Saviour – see https://www.worldcomicbookreview.com/2023/01/13/white-savior-1-review/ ). What is Mr Barnes up to? It is almost certainly a deliberate choice. Tensu Run unexpectedly finds himself at the centre of an obsession by those who back the lost Republic, triggered by his brave rescue of some captives from a secret Imperial jail. At the end of the first issue, using typical Jedi counterintuition, Tensu Run decides to confront the Inquisitors, rather than continue to evade them. This is a miniseries: can we expect Tensu Run to not survive the storyline so that the Great White Hope precedes A New Hope?
As a first issue goes, Inquisitors #1 was a solid set-up to hopefully an increasingly exciting story. There is only so much wiggle room within the Star Wars universe because of the parameters of the franchise. Perhaps Tensu Run, as a disposable newcomer, might be the spark to ignition.