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arf88's review
3.0
An interesting idea about the conflicts of technology and traditions, and the young vs. the old. However I can't say it was written particularly well. The art was good for the most part, although any depictions of Yoda crept into uncanny valley.
jaredkwheeler's review
1.0
Star Wars Legends Project #63
Background: Prelude to Rebellion came out in 6 issues from December 1998 to May 1999. The trade paperback was released in May of 2000. Several years later it was collected in [b:Star Wars Omnibus: Rise of the Sith|4632482|Star Wars Omnibus Rise of the Sith|Mike Kennedy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403204951s/4632482.jpg|4682561] (my review). The story was written by [a:Jan Strnad|17734|Jan Strnad|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1350228415p2/17734.jpg] with art pencilled by [a:Anthony Winn|5078618|Anthony Winn|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. Strnad also wrote a couple storylines for the X-Wing comic series, and has worked on various other non-Star Wars comics and books, in addition to writing for television (most notably for Disney shows like Goof Troop). Winn has not worked on any other Star Wars series, but has done a lot of other work, particularly for Marvel on X-Men and Avengers titles.
Prelude to Rebellion is set 33 years before the Battle of Yavin, 1 year before The Phantom Menace. The main character is Jedi Knight Ki-Adi-Mundi, with major appearances (randomly) by Ephant Mon and Jabba the Hutt. Naturally, the story ends up on Tatooine, as well.
Summary: As a Jedi and a Cerean, Ki-Adi-Mundi is proud to protect and defend his planet from both internal and external threats. Now he faces a threat that is both: As the Republic presses Cerea to join, hoping to flood the simple planet with new technology and trade and gain access to the Cereans' valuable natural resources, Ki finds himself at odds with both the cynical diplomats who would exploit his world and the younger generation who feel he is hopelessly mired in the past. But even Ki doesn't know the true depths of the evil being plotted in secret.
Review: I wish I could say that this is the worst backstory in all of Star Wars, but unfortunately I've read "Skippy the Jedi Droid." Suffice to say this is still really, really bad. And it's bad in two ways, one of which is not really its fault, but which I hold against it anyway. First, broadly, the things that are its fault: The writing is stilted and corny. The story never makes any sense at all. There isn't a single character that is likable or even just slightly compelling.
Second, the thing that isn't really its fault: This story does an incredibly poor job, on almost every level, of fitting into the continuity established by the prequels. It helps to know, as I did not realize until I was done reading, that it was published entirely before the release of Episode I. So many baffling things about this story suddenly make sense once you know that. So, maybe it's not really this story's fault that it doesn't play nicely with the rest of the established canon because that stuff wasn't established yet. However, I still feel like I have to count that against it on some level, because first, so many of the ideas in it are just so bad on their own merits (thank goodness they fit so badly with everything else), and second, they shouldn't have played so extensively in a sandbox that hadn't been built yet!
So, let's look at some of these issues in a bit more detail. I'm probably not going to be able to get to everything that made this so awful, but I'll try to be systematic about it. The most egregious offense in the writing is the constant running narration written in present-tense. I'm not sure what style it's going for . . . Maybe a little hard-boiled detective noir, maybe more Golden-Age of comics . . . But it just comes off like an evangelical tract in all of its awkwardness and compulsion for over-explaining.
The story starts off okay, if you ignore all of the weirdness of the details and the shallowness of the premise, but how it unfolds never makes any sense. Ki ends up in pursuit of a fugitive, which leads him off-world and lands him in the middle of what turns out to be a totally unrelated plot that never quite gets explained all the way. Which is okay, because it turns out not to matter at all anyway. It's all just an excuse to resolve Ki's character arc and provide a totally vague tie-in with some Trade Federation stuff that's theoretically going to be important in Episode I (but actually totally isn't).
But it's hardest to get over how awful the characters are. Ki is basically the only sympathetic figure with any screentime. Everyone else is either incredibly annoying or super-evil (or both). And that would be fine if either Ki or any of the villains were remotely interesting, but they aren't. Ki's character arc is basically to learn that his living daughters need to be as important to him as the son he may one day have, which is just gross. Don't ever have your main character learn a lesson that any basically decent human being already gets. Of the remaining cast, Ephant Mon comes the closest to being worthwhile. He's an utterly bizarre choice for the role he fills, but there are hints at a mix of ruthlessness and intelligence in his character that could have really gone somewhere. Could have.
The fact that Ephant Mon, a random alien standing around in Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, plays a major role in this story seems like such a throwback to a pre-prequel mentality of making connections between the brand-new period of the prequels and stuff from the original trilogy. This would also explain (perhaps) why the story feels like it has to drag us back to Tatooine, apropos of nothing, where now apparently deadly ion storms are a common occurrence.
Far more jarring than that, though, is pretty much everything about Ki-Adi-Mundi and how he goes about being a Jedi. Ki leaves his family (oppressed by vicious local raiders) to train with the Jedi with the explicit idea that he will one day return to his homeworld and deal with the problems there. Which, actually, is the one difference that makes sense. There really is no good explanation for why it takes Anakin 10 years to go back and try to figure out whether he can free his enslaved mother in the prequel trilogy, and that he basically goes rogue to do so. But that's the only thing about Ki's life that makes any sense. We're told that on Cerea, only 1 in 20 children is born male, which necessitates the males of the species marrying multiple wives. Ki has at least 2 that we see, though he seems to have as many as 6? Or is it 20? It's not terribly clear, but he has multiple daughters as well (although we only see 1).
Obviously this is a pretty serious departure from the no-marriage, no-attachments Jedi Order we see in the prequels. But even more than that, it's such an obvious juvenile male fantasy, too . . . Particularly when female Cereans in the story seem totally subordinate to males (all of the authority figures we see are male, and Ki's wives are totally submissive and deferential to him). Which doesn't make a lot of sense if you consider that they're supposed to be 95% of the population. Males would obviously be important in a society like that because of their role in the continuation of the species, but would it really be so extremely patriarchal? It feels like a failure of imagination by a male author.
This story also puts Ki at odds with the Republic in this story, and the Republic, or at least their representatives, basically come across as some of the major villains. It's never very clear exactly how that meshes with Ki's role as a leading member of an order that is sworn to protect the Republic, since he doesn't even live on a planet that is a member of the Republic, and it seems he never leaves the planet. In fact, when he eventually does depart, he has to get special permission from the Jedi Council to extend his jurisdiction, which is just all kinds of odd.
The artwork is alright, even really good in a lot of places, with one huge exception. I imagine it would take a great deal of effort to draw Cereans in a way that doesn't make them look like the Coneheads. Winn didn't pull it off. Actually, he made it worse by giving a lot of them hairstyles and make-up and headgear that emphasized the absurdity of their heads, particularly the teenagers. Which was even more unfortunate when all of the teenagers talked like characters out of a 1950s educational short.
And there are plenty of other issues, as well . . . But you get the picture. Avoid, avoid, avoid. This story's biggest contribution to the timeline is that it concludes with the Jedi Council wanting to make Ki a member . . . but so did Jedi Council: Acts of War, so even that revelation is redundant at this point.
D-
Background: Prelude to Rebellion came out in 6 issues from December 1998 to May 1999. The trade paperback was released in May of 2000. Several years later it was collected in [b:Star Wars Omnibus: Rise of the Sith|4632482|Star Wars Omnibus Rise of the Sith|Mike Kennedy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403204951s/4632482.jpg|4682561] (my review). The story was written by [a:Jan Strnad|17734|Jan Strnad|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1350228415p2/17734.jpg] with art pencilled by [a:Anthony Winn|5078618|Anthony Winn|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. Strnad also wrote a couple storylines for the X-Wing comic series, and has worked on various other non-Star Wars comics and books, in addition to writing for television (most notably for Disney shows like Goof Troop). Winn has not worked on any other Star Wars series, but has done a lot of other work, particularly for Marvel on X-Men and Avengers titles.
Prelude to Rebellion is set 33 years before the Battle of Yavin, 1 year before The Phantom Menace. The main character is Jedi Knight Ki-Adi-Mundi, with major appearances (randomly) by Ephant Mon and Jabba the Hutt. Naturally, the story ends up on Tatooine, as well.
Summary: As a Jedi and a Cerean, Ki-Adi-Mundi is proud to protect and defend his planet from both internal and external threats. Now he faces a threat that is both: As the Republic presses Cerea to join, hoping to flood the simple planet with new technology and trade and gain access to the Cereans' valuable natural resources, Ki finds himself at odds with both the cynical diplomats who would exploit his world and the younger generation who feel he is hopelessly mired in the past. But even Ki doesn't know the true depths of the evil being plotted in secret.
Review: I wish I could say that this is the worst backstory in all of Star Wars, but unfortunately I've read "Skippy the Jedi Droid." Suffice to say this is still really, really bad. And it's bad in two ways, one of which is not really its fault, but which I hold against it anyway. First, broadly, the things that are its fault: The writing is stilted and corny. The story never makes any sense at all. There isn't a single character that is likable or even just slightly compelling.
Second, the thing that isn't really its fault: This story does an incredibly poor job, on almost every level, of fitting into the continuity established by the prequels. It helps to know, as I did not realize until I was done reading, that it was published entirely before the release of Episode I. So many baffling things about this story suddenly make sense once you know that. So, maybe it's not really this story's fault that it doesn't play nicely with the rest of the established canon because that stuff wasn't established yet. However, I still feel like I have to count that against it on some level, because first, so many of the ideas in it are just so bad on their own merits (thank goodness they fit so badly with everything else), and second, they shouldn't have played so extensively in a sandbox that hadn't been built yet!
So, let's look at some of these issues in a bit more detail. I'm probably not going to be able to get to everything that made this so awful, but I'll try to be systematic about it. The most egregious offense in the writing is the constant running narration written in present-tense. I'm not sure what style it's going for . . . Maybe a little hard-boiled detective noir, maybe more Golden-Age of comics . . . But it just comes off like an evangelical tract in all of its awkwardness and compulsion for over-explaining.
The story starts off okay, if you ignore all of the weirdness of the details and the shallowness of the premise, but how it unfolds never makes any sense. Ki ends up in pursuit of a fugitive, which leads him off-world and lands him in the middle of what turns out to be a totally unrelated plot that never quite gets explained all the way. Which is okay, because it turns out not to matter at all anyway. It's all just an excuse to resolve Ki's character arc and provide a totally vague tie-in with some Trade Federation stuff that's theoretically going to be important in Episode I (but actually totally isn't).
But it's hardest to get over how awful the characters are. Ki is basically the only sympathetic figure with any screentime. Everyone else is either incredibly annoying or super-evil (or both). And that would be fine if either Ki or any of the villains were remotely interesting, but they aren't. Ki's character arc is basically to learn that his living daughters need to be as important to him as the son he may one day have, which is just gross. Don't ever have your main character learn a lesson that any basically decent human being already gets. Of the remaining cast, Ephant Mon comes the closest to being worthwhile. He's an utterly bizarre choice for the role he fills, but there are hints at a mix of ruthlessness and intelligence in his character that could have really gone somewhere. Could have.
The fact that Ephant Mon, a random alien standing around in Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, plays a major role in this story seems like such a throwback to a pre-prequel mentality of making connections between the brand-new period of the prequels and stuff from the original trilogy. This would also explain (perhaps) why the story feels like it has to drag us back to Tatooine, apropos of nothing, where now apparently deadly ion storms are a common occurrence.
Far more jarring than that, though, is pretty much everything about Ki-Adi-Mundi and how he goes about being a Jedi. Ki leaves his family (oppressed by vicious local raiders) to train with the Jedi with the explicit idea that he will one day return to his homeworld and deal with the problems there. Which, actually, is the one difference that makes sense. There really is no good explanation for why it takes Anakin 10 years to go back and try to figure out whether he can free his enslaved mother in the prequel trilogy, and that he basically goes rogue to do so. But that's the only thing about Ki's life that makes any sense. We're told that on Cerea, only 1 in 20 children is born male, which necessitates the males of the species marrying multiple wives. Ki has at least 2 that we see, though he seems to have as many as 6? Or is it 20? It's not terribly clear, but he has multiple daughters as well (although we only see 1).
Obviously this is a pretty serious departure from the no-marriage, no-attachments Jedi Order we see in the prequels. But even more than that, it's such an obvious juvenile male fantasy, too . . . Particularly when female Cereans in the story seem totally subordinate to males (all of the authority figures we see are male, and Ki's wives are totally submissive and deferential to him). Which doesn't make a lot of sense if you consider that they're supposed to be 95% of the population. Males would obviously be important in a society like that because of their role in the continuation of the species, but would it really be so extremely patriarchal? It feels like a failure of imagination by a male author.
This story also puts Ki at odds with the Republic in this story, and the Republic, or at least their representatives, basically come across as some of the major villains. It's never very clear exactly how that meshes with Ki's role as a leading member of an order that is sworn to protect the Republic, since he doesn't even live on a planet that is a member of the Republic, and it seems he never leaves the planet. In fact, when he eventually does depart, he has to get special permission from the Jedi Council to extend his jurisdiction, which is just all kinds of odd.
The artwork is alright, even really good in a lot of places, with one huge exception. I imagine it would take a great deal of effort to draw Cereans in a way that doesn't make them look like the Coneheads. Winn didn't pull it off. Actually, he made it worse by giving a lot of them hairstyles and make-up and headgear that emphasized the absurdity of their heads, particularly the teenagers. Which was even more unfortunate when all of the teenagers talked like characters out of a 1950s educational short.
And there are plenty of other issues, as well . . . But you get the picture. Avoid, avoid, avoid. This story's biggest contribution to the timeline is that it concludes with the Jedi Council wanting to make Ki a member . . . but so did Jedi Council: Acts of War, so even that revelation is redundant at this point.
D-
wyrmbergmalcolm's review
3.0
One of the few Jedi Council members to get a speaking line in the films, plus one of the more upsetting Order 66 deaths (after Aayla Secura), we get to find out more about Ki-Adi-Mundi and Cerean culture. It was great seeing how a Jedi can do his duties while being a family man at the same time. The 20-1 female-male ratio of Cereans meant that Ki-Adi-Mundi was allowed to marry for the sake of the species.
This story takes a little while to get going leading to a bizarre aliens-type encounter in space (it would be great to see those things back again) and a rather unnecessary encounter with Jabba the Hutt and a lightning storm.
Jabba's best buddy Ephant Mon also featured a fair bit in this story, and I enjoyed seeing him fleshed out a bit more. I always found him one of the more intriguing characters of Jabba's entourage.
The bonus story at the back that follows Ki-Adi-Mundi's first solo mission as a Jedi dealing with bandits on Cerea was a nice little bonus.
This story takes a little while to get going leading to a bizarre aliens-type encounter in space (it would be great to see those things back again) and a rather unnecessary encounter with Jabba the Hutt and a lightning storm.
Jabba's best buddy Ephant Mon also featured a fair bit in this story, and I enjoyed seeing him fleshed out a bit more. I always found him one of the more intriguing characters of Jabba's entourage.
The bonus story at the back that follows Ki-Adi-Mundi's first solo mission as a Jedi dealing with bandits on Cerea was a nice little bonus.
irasobrietate's review
1.0
Who's ready for a rant about Cerean gender politics??
So Cereans have a really lopsided gender breakdown: 20 women for every man. Yet despite the fact that there are so many more women than men, it's still a painfully heterosexual world. It seems to practice polygamy, but not polyamory. The women married to a single man seem to have a sort of combative relationship; there's a primary bond-wife and the rest of the women are honor-wives. This would have been a prime opportunity for some good queer polyamory and they fucking fell down on the job I am so angry.
Plus, despite the fact that there are drastically fewer men than women, the majority of the Cerean characters in this book were still men?? I feel like all the members of the Elder's Council were men and I am just floored. Hell, the main character is a dude and I am so mad that it wasn't the queer woman that it clearly should have been based on their species breakdown.
The actual story is pretty much the usual SW action/adventure nonsense but I'm just so angry about their gender politics I could scream which leaves me hating this comic series.
So Cereans have a really lopsided gender breakdown: 20 women for every man. Yet despite the fact that there are so many more women than men, it's still a painfully heterosexual world. It seems to practice polygamy, but not polyamory. The women married to a single man seem to have a sort of combative relationship; there's a primary bond-wife and the rest of the women are honor-wives. This would have been a prime opportunity for some good queer polyamory and they fucking fell down on the job I am so angry.
Plus, despite the fact that there are drastically fewer men than women, the majority of the Cerean characters in this book were still men?? I feel like all the members of the Elder's Council were men and I am just floored. Hell, the main character is a dude and I am so mad that it wasn't the queer woman that it clearly should have been based on their species breakdown.
The actual story is pretty much the usual SW action/adventure nonsense but I'm just so angry about their gender politics I could scream which leaves me hating this comic series.
wyrmbergsabrina's review
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
My first proper go at the vast Star Wars graphic novels, pre Disney. I wanted to tackle the Clone Wars books, because they have some cracking tales in, so my hubby got me the background ones to introduce all the main characters.
First up, Ki-Adi-Mundi, who is a Jedi, but allowed to have a family because of the disproportionately high female birth rate. But all the Elders are male?
It's an okay story, about young against old, new tech and traditional way of life, drug smuggling and the loom of change on the horizon. It's a shame it all feels a bit flat, I didn't really identify with our hero, a missed opportunity for some diversity and some decent female leads, and some very questionable fashion choices. I know the artist is trying to make characters stand out, but hmmm.
Not a great starter. But it can only go up from here.
First up, Ki-Adi-Mundi, who is a Jedi, but allowed to have a family because of the disproportionately high female birth rate. But all the Elders are male?
It's an okay story, about young against old, new tech and traditional way of life, drug smuggling and the loom of change on the horizon. It's a shame it all feels a bit flat, I didn't really identify with our hero, a missed opportunity for some diversity and some decent female leads, and some very questionable fashion choices. I know the artist is trying to make characters stand out, but hmmm.
Not a great starter. But it can only go up from here.
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