The High Republic: Children of the Storm: Chapter 1: Now and Forever
What is it ? : So it's been a year since the destruction of The Starlight Beacon, and Keeve Trennis is trying to meditate, but ever since the death of her Master Skeer she has been haunted by dreams of his death. She wasn't with him at the end, but she imagines the various horrible ways he could have died, his sacrifice on the Starlight Beacon haunts her.
She is roused by a call for her, Jedi Master Trennis to report to the flight deck, she is aboard the Gios, a Republic Longbeam cruiser. On the flight deck she meets the commander of the vessel, Jahen, some other Jedi, among them Ceret and Terec. They are receiving a message from Coruscant, but the signal keeps breaking up, when they get to speak, Jedi Master Mann tells them that the Nihil are trying to forge an alliance with the Hutts, which would legitimise the Nihil, and provide support for the Hutts on worlds they can barely hold on to alone.
In the year since the destruction of the Beacon, the Nihil have claimed an area of the galaxy they have called the Occlusion Zone, and erected an impenetrable barrier called the Stormwall which stops the Republic aiding those caught behind the wall.
Meanwhile on the Hutt world of Ballum, the representative of the Nihil, Affanar, meets with the Hutt, Skarabda the Wise. Their bodyguards fight, as each tries to prove they are more powerful, with Affanar trying to prove that Skarabda needs the Nihil, and Skarabda trying to prove that she is still powerful without them.
The conflict is stopped when the Gios arrives in orbit and the Jedi attack, the cruiser launching fighters and landing craft, so the conflict is on the surface as well as in orbit.
The battle rages, until another vessel arrives, the Ataraxia, the cruiser of Avar Kriss, lost to Lourna Dee a year before, and Keeve finds herself face to face with Dee herself on the planets surface. . .
High Points : So first of all, I kind of gave up on the High Republic Era when the original comic series ended, I'd been following the adventures of Keeve Trennis, and like many of the good ideas they had in that series, they'd seemingly abandoned her too.
But she's back in this latest series for Phase III of the High Republic, so I've ignored the Phase II comic series, and jumped straight into this. And it's jumped on a year in the storyline, so we're catching up on events in that year.
The Nihil are now a much more credible threat, apparently having evolved into a rival galactic force, rather than just a pirate gang who'd discovered the path drives which worked better than Hyperdrives, so we're able to raid far better than normal pirates. Now they've also developed a forcewall which blocks off an entire area of the galaxy, so they've got access to strange and different technologies, which could make the story very interesting if it's a clash between two empires using technologies which operate in different ways so require special strategies to defeat.
Low Points : Ignoring the idea that this group of pirates are developing technologies which seem to be better than anything developed by the Empire a hundred years later, there's some questions I've got about the series.
Firstly, Keeve Trennis, a character in which I found a lot I liked, especially her uncanny ability to hook up with people who everybody else thought was completely useless, and obtain vital information from. She's now a Jedi Master? But the very first issue of the comic was her test to become a Jedi Knight, and we saw her unconventional way of passing the test (she abandoned and therefore failed the test, but saved an entire planet instead, so was made a Knight), but here we are only a couple of years later and she's a Jedi Master. Especially when she's been involved in so much that the Jedi Council thought was improper, the alliance with the Hutts, the war against the Drengir, etc. The Jedi Council withdrew Avar Kriss's command of the Starlight Beacon because of these actions, but Keeve gets a promotion?
And the Hutts were allied to the Jedi when the Drengir were a threat, and now the Jedi attack just because the Nihil have send an envoy? Seems pretty darn aggressive to me, and especially so since the Hutt alliance was one of the interesting things the original High Republic comic series abandoned as it went along. The balance of both sides working together to defeat a threat to both, but the Jedi being offended by the way the Hutts operate, was an interesting one. With the Jedi coming across as kind of racist, as they were ready to blame the Hutts for almost anything, even though the Hutts were actually sticking to their treaty perfectly well. And this most recent attack, doesn't make the Jedi look any better.
So what do you really think ? : Difficult to tell at this point, we're getting reintroduced to the characters, and it's a bit of an infodump as readers of Phase I get updated as to everything that's been going on, and new readers get updated to everything which happened to the characters in Phase I. But we're back into action, and it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Final Words : I'm guessing some of the characters I don't know have been introduced in Phase II, and we're now getting a mash up of Phases I + II, so I've some catching up to do myself. But it's good to see Keeve, Ceret and Terec back, I've wanted to see what happened next in their stories, and am glad I'm going to get an opportunity to.
Score : 8/10
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