Any journey into the world of Star Wars is a good one.
Granted some of the delivery may not be the best at times but overall the franchise has a knack for crafting beguiling tales full of characters who, by virtue of being out in space, have a certain exotically epic quality to them while still feeling relatably own-to-earth in a way that heroes don’t always manage.
Luke Skywalker for instance may be a legend of the rebellion and a Jedi pilot with the ability to find the weakness in the Death Star and exploit it to blast the planet killer weapon to pieces but he’s also, or he was anyway, just a kid with a gee-whiz yearning to leave the arid wastes of Tatooine, and find some excitement out fighting the Empire.
Similarly his sister Leia, form whom he was separated not long after birth, might be a princess and one of the few surviving residents of Alderaan, but she’s proven time and again that she has the grits, the smarts and the no-fuss attitude to fight to free the galaxy from tyranny.
Luke, Leia, Poe Dameron, Rey, Finn and a host of others are both larger-than-life warriors from freedom while possessing the groundedness need to survive the rigours of guerilla warfare and to bring others willingly to their cause.
This mix of epically out there and groundedly human is on full glorious display in the first four episodes of Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories, a 12-issue collection obviously one third of the way through – issue #5 is due later this month with more to follow in 2023 – a series of thrilling tales, all of which are connected not only by the fight to rid the galaxy free of evil or keep it free (the anthology is set at various points across the entire Star Wars timeline) but a secret thirteenth story told in the background of all 12 instalments which, a Star Wars wiki informs us, “will become obvious if the series is read in chronological order”.
Each story focuses, at least so far, one two key characters paired together so in issue 1 we have Obi-Wan and pre-Darth Vadered Anakin Skywalker going to the aid of Padmé Amidala, the senator from Naboo who is Leia and Luke’s mum, on the Moon of Staggec in the Outer Rim, while the second issue has Luke and Leia doing their best to escape Banas which is not exactly the ideal Rebel base possibility they hoped it might be.
Meanwhile in the third instalment, Poe and Finn are sent to get livestock on the planet Kamil to feed a hungry Rebellion only to find themselves with way more on their hands than they bargained for, something that Chewbacca and Rey can identify with as a quietly important Life Day on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk becomes way wilder and louder than it’s supposed to be.
In each of these succinctly told stories by different authors and artists, we are invited to witness what happens when things don’t go quite according to plan – let’s be honest where would be the fun if they did? – and our heroes have draw on both their skill as trained warriors and their innate humanity to get to the other side of the trouble they find themselves in.
Each and every tale is a ton of fun to be involved with each of the writers and artists capturing that swashbuckling sense of Westerns/Ninja fun that has made reading or watching Star Wars such an escapist pleasure.
They also deliver on that heady mix of the epic and the grounded that has charactrised the franchise from the very beginning when 1977’s A New Hope served up BIG storytelling with intimately real human stories and made you care even as it took your breath away, and which makes Star Wars something you really want to watch because these people are real and what happens to them really matters.
They might be freedom fighters with the kind of lives that are a thousand parsecs from normal but even in the midst of battle and scrapes for survival, they have concerns that vibe with our own – they want to live, they want to live, they want their lives to mean something and they want find a home with those they love.
It’s all evident in Hyperspace Stories which absolutely nails the humanity at the heart of every fightback against evil; case in point is the end of issue 4 which declares that “no matter how big the galaxy is … love always finds a way home”.
In any other context, this might be insufferably cheesy but after you’ve watched Chewie and Rey go through hell to save themselves and others, and to salvage Life Day, you know they’ve earned every last bit of their happy(ish) ending.
The same goes for the other three stories, and while it’s not entirely what the hidden arc-story might be (not this reader at least who admittedly read the issues while profoundly tired), it’s clear that Hyperspace Stories is going somewhere very exciting indeed.
