Each with their own missions, Han, Leia, Luke, and Chewbacca must deal with the complications that arise during them. Very minor spoilers for Star Wars #69 follow.
With new creative teams taking over, there can always feel like a lull during the transition period. Luckily for Star Wars, this never felt like the case. Greg Pak and Phil Noto hit the ground running with their first issue and they continue to do so with this second issue. It’s not quite as good as Star Wars #68 was, but this issue is still really enjoyable and completely feels like Star Wars. Pak and Noto really do capture the feel of Star Wars better than any creative has so far on the mainline Star Wars series.
Pak, once again in this issue, absolutely nails the voice of each character better than maybe any writer other than Lawrence Kasdan. Every single bit of dialogue in this issue feels like the characters than we know and there’s not an inkling of being a different character. Even when in situations that these characters have never really been shown in before, they still feel right. For example, C-3P0 is trying to talk with a species that he doesn’t know the language too. That could very much make him not feel like C-3P0, but Pak manages to make it work incredibly well. This goes for every character in this issue.
As for the story aspects of this issue, they work incredibly well too. There are three separate stories being told in this issue and yet there’s really no disruption when the issue changes to a different story. There’s a flow to this issue that shouldn’t really work given the separate stories being told, yet it does. There’s no jumping back and forth between the stories. A story is told and when it feels like it should, it ends. Nothing else. This is a style and structure that is immensely difficult to pull off, yet Pak and Noto are able to so incredibly well. And because they are able to pull it off so well, the issue manages to feel incredibly fast-paced, yet still provides the character moments that it needs.
Just as Pak’s dialogue captures the essence of Star Wars incredibly well, Noto’s art does too. Each story in this issue has a distinct visual style that both feels classic Star Wars combined with Noto’s aesthetic. Leia and Han’s story feels like Coruscant combined with Blade Runner and Noto provides fantastic flair to it. Luke’s feels the most like classic Star Wars as it’s set in a desert. This could easily just feel like a rehash, but Noto manages to make sand look different than say, Tatooine. I really don’t know how he did it. In Chewbacca and C-3P0’s story, Noto also manages to portray his excellent handling of body language. Every single character in that story is non-human, yet Noto manages to convey every emotion so well just from the body language he uses.
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