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sethnakht · 1 year

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darth vader (2020-), #26 (pak/ienco)

it’s a podrace! darth vader pilots a podracer through an artificial sandstorm to save sabé, the former double for queen amidala, who has been lost in its center. vader flies alone through a maelstrom manufactured by the empire; as he steers and slices his way past dark obstacles, his mind dwells on the podrace he won as a child slave to help queen amidala, then represented too by sabé while padmé masked herself as a handmaiden.

before he won that race, vader remembers, he could find his mother even in sandstorms, and promise her he would never leave her. in the subsequent panels, we see the contrasting results of winning: it meant separation from his mother, interrogation by the jedi council over his fear of losing her, his mother’s death, his own subsequent choice to murder the villagers who’d held her hostage, and finally, separation from padmé again because of jedi and sith. specifically, vader remembers how she’d fallen out of their ship into a sand dune, and his jedi master obi-wan ordering him to leave her behind (so they could pursue the sith lord count dooku instead). surrounded by sand with his mother, he was never closer to her; alone in the jedi temple, before his mother’s grave, a smattering of sand kernels was all he had left.

[image caption: panels from two different pages showing vader’s memories of losing his mother - first when he was taken to the temple, then when she died. anakin’s hand is shown in close-up, stray grains of sand in his palm.]

vader wins this race as well. as he once helped queen amidala and her handmaidens leave tatooine, so too does he now save the queen’s shadow. when he arrives at the site where sabé disappeared, he finds anakin’s childhood friend kitster (more context below), who learned how to build pods from anakin and put together the pod that vader has just raced. kitster shows him that sabé has been buried alive under a toppled cylinder. vader lifts it with the force; as she rises from the shallow grave, he remembers his power from before he won the tatooine race and was taken to the jedi - the power to tell his mother, “don’t worry, we’re going to be fine,” and, “I’m not leaving you.”

[image caption: vader saves sabé with kitster’s help, and remembers finding his mother in a sandstorm.]

but it’s not that easy. generated by an energy-eating machine (I think? again, don’t ask me about the lore), the storm doesn’t respond to vader’s attempts to quell it with the force. he realizes that sabé will be consumed by it - he thinks back to leaving padmé behind, her body half-buried in sand - if he fails to call on machine power.

using the cylinder-gravestone from which he’d just freed sabé as armor for himself, sabé, and kitster, vader directs his orbiting flagship to fire upon his location with maximum incinerating force. the result: all the sand in the storm fuses and flattens into a smooth ground of glass.

the sand still caught in his glove slides down his palm; vader looks at it, looks at it for a long time. this time, it seems, it is not all that he has left: he has saved sabé from death. letting the sand fall from his hand, he lifts sabé and carries her over the glass into the light horizon.

[image caption: vader steps out from an armored shell into a landscape he’s had incinerated; sand has transformed into black glass. some sand that was caught in his glove falls from his hand; he lets it, then takes sabé from kitster and walks towards a sunlit cloud.]

so ... why is kitster here? vader has come to this place because sabé is as haunted by his mother’s death as he is. troubled by the fact that anakin, a child slave, won a podrace to help royalty, and that his mother was nonetheless left behind in slavery, padmé had directed sabé to find shmi on tatooine. never having met shmi before, as queen amidala did not leave her starship on tatooine, sabé failed to locate shmi on that mission. she did manage to free a small number of slaves, however, including anakin’s childhood best friend kitster, and relocate them. the more immediate context is this: these ex-slaves are now under threat from a crimson dawn operative masquerading as an imperial, or something (don’t ask me about the lore-related details of the plot, I can only grasp at relationships between images). and since vader has vowed to end crimson dawn in the name of restoring “order”, sabé was able to convince him to visit this community, and work with people like kitster to destroy the imperial/dawn weapon that caused the sandstorm in the first place.

in summary. we are here because of shared grief over shmi and padmé, over shared grief about the results of that first podrace. we have a second race with a parallel result - vader has helped the former queen, again; helped padmé, in a way, again - and a contrast: there is no jedi betting on vader’s freedom, now. but in some sense this is another parallel. for as winning the race led vader to coruscant and the jedi temple, the comic now cuts to the former temple, now the imperial palace, on coruscant.

[image caption: it is night on coruscant; the former jedi temple, now the emperor’s palace, is shown in dark profile against a sky lit pink-purple from the city lights.]

the emperor is speaking, speaking to himself, ignoring his red-robed guards, who gaze at each other questioningly. vader, the emperor mutters, couldn’t save his mother, nor padmé. but now he thinks he can --

well, the emperor doesn’t finish the sentence. you might say the emperor is betting on failure; he is delighted by what he anticipates, for he closes the issue with his cackles. you can fill in the blanks.

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sethnakht · 1 year

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everyone wants darth vader dead in greg pak and raffaele ienco's darth vader, it seems, seemingly including darth vader. no sooner has luke slipped his grasp does it strike into public awareness like a firework set off in a crowd -- vader's power, too, is slipping. the weight of that collective scrutiny -- from officers, bounty hunters, and assassins to the paper-pushers of the Imperial court and the former handmaidens of Queen Amidala -- manifests in a hunger to dismantle him physically, to wrench and tear off the armor, to see him gorged upon by giant monsters, to freeze him and puppet him, to seize control over the "softbody" and flay him of his life support. nor is vader left unaffected by this hostile focus on his physical limits -- as he slouches, limps, stumbles, crawls -- and pauses, exhaustedly, though there is no way to catch his breath -- his way through the comic, the gleaming armor is hacked, punctured, electrocuted, torn open, shattered, and burned, while his thoughts dwell on weakness, grief, and fear. such abjection, however short lived, sets this comic run far apart from marvel's previous two darth vader runs, both of which traced an upward trajectory: vader's rise to the height of his power in esb (gillen/larroca), and his journey to becoming a committed sith after rots (soule/camuncoli). the trajectory here is to the grave.

Darth Vader (2020-) #5, Pak/Ienco/et al - observing that vader is walking right into a major barrage of fire - not for the first time - the forensic droid accompanying him hints that he might have a death wish.

vader himself refuses to admit weakness, of course - at least consciously - but his arguments bear all the weakness of bad political discourse. "there is no conflict", he says, making one think of conflict; "my son is weak", he says, making one think of the father. when you tell someone not to think of an elephant, even in negation, you invoke the elephant. darth vader is very good at conjuring the elephant, and making one peer very closely into the bold and marked outlines of its supposed non-existence.

Darth Vader (2020-) #1, Pak, Ienco, et al - unable to handle that he has been rejected by his son, Vader transfers the failure to Luke, calling him "weak" for choosing to flee him, for choosing potential death over Vader's offer of power, even as he stands empty-handed before a gravesite, his own desire to punish the dead thwarted by his having made them so. The comic doesn't leave it at ironic framing - Vader too is aware of what he is invoking, and the associations brought up as he stands at the site of his mother's grave show that Vader cannot entirely suppress his own sense of failure - his own memories of his own perceived weakness.

vader's private thoughts -- rendered in the comic in startling little red boxes that, like mummy coffins, nest in larger black boxes, nearly always isolated from physical imagery, from contact with the visual world -- are as tiring and repetitive as an unwelcome pigeon on the window sill. the stunner is not what he thinks or even what he invokes, but that his thoughts are not actually private at all. there is no room to admit weakness because, as it turns out, vader's master can pick up on his thoughts from the other side of the galaxy. vader's master can croon into his black boxes, scoop out the words and spit them back out like trite poetry learned from heart in grade school. watching him from afar, vader's master reads into his actions and mocks what is unexpressed. if there's a space free from his influence -- an influence that is similar to the reader's influence, an influence that explains why we can see his thoughts at all, because we too are complicit and voyeurs -- it might only be the gutters, those gaps between panels where the mind completes the temporal and spatial relationships between the images. in the page from the first issue shown above, for example, note how the speech balloon for the remembered "I won't fail again" nearly connects with vader's head in the panel below it, linking anakin's grief-filled promise to become stronger with vader's helmeted head, all while lingering on padmé's face - his next inevitable failure. even if he cannot think it.

the humiliation is public, we're part of the frenzied mob, swiping at the armor for scraps of cursed fabric -- transgressing boundaries both mental and physical, eating up that transgression like the intimate, play-by-play accounts of a famous suicide. vader's armor is repeatedly hacked, a gag that bluntly serves to hammer and hammer and hammer home for you that shame of being mocked before the class that specially belongs to darth vader, dark lord of the sith.

Darth Vader (2020-) #13, Pak, Ienco, et al - Vader is made a puppet more than once over the course of the comic, frozen and trapped both in his mind and body.

to be honest, I was originally a little annoyed by the number of hacking attempts -- everyone gets to take their shot at controlling vader, from hutts and droids to the handmaidens to a psychic squid who puppets him with its tentacles -- because of the frequency and similarity of the attempts, because while vader does address some vulnerabilities, he still gets scanned and sliced, meaning he's overlooking weaknesses or choosing not to address them; because he doesn't seem greatly affected by the threat to his bodily autonomy, and because of the friction with gillen's run (where being hacked sends vader into a high-stakes psychosis and is a major and unusual event that he takes measures to prevent from happening again in the aphra comics). then I remembered this scene:

Darth Vader (2020), #12 (Pak, Vilanova, et al) - After losing all but one limb, being set on fire, tracking through lava on mismatched ancient droid parts, being chased and attacked by assassins, droid scrappers, an Imperial Star Destroyer, and a wall of Sith acolytes, then nearly ripped apart mentally and physically by a psychotic giant squid and a screaming kyber crystal, Vader is "repaired" on Coruscant - i.e. sawed open - before a hostile, chattering audience, the Emperor laughingly dismissing him as a threat.

which. is. absolutely. fucked. up!! and to top it off, there's this sly little sequence --

Darth Vader (2020-) #14 (Pak, Ienco, et al) - Vader's armor specifications appear to be tracked with each repair and are openly accessible to the Imperial court

-- which shows that even if vader updates his armor, that knowledge will be recorded the next time he comes in for a repair (if it's not always being transmitted automatically). anyone with sufficient credentials in the imperial machine, including the demoted sub-administrator sly moore, can access his repair logs, analyze them for untested weaknesses, and saunter off with an suit override stick. (to be sure, sly moore isn't supposed to be looking at his records and is chastised when she's found; she also tries to use the same kill stick twice, failing to account for the updates vader does make after the first slicing attempt, perhaps because she hasn't checked or been able to access the records for updates. the point here though is that vader's suit is a matter of government record, treated like imperial property; you can imagine all sorts of fun scenarios here, such as that his private upgrades are wiped each time he comes into the repair center, or that new vulnerabilities are built in each time, etc.)

even the dead contribute to this panopticon effect. in the latest issue of the comic, the skakoan jul tambor reveals that he's been collecting dismembered droids -- each of them individually sliced apart by darth vader over the years (notably, however, most of them are separatist droids, hinting at tambor's blind spot: he hasn't collected the droid corpses anakin left littered on battlefields). drawing on their recorded logs of their own demise, tambor observes vader precisely when he might feel the least concern about it -- in the act of killing, of eradicating the viewer. the now-repaired droids possess a kind of moving simulacrum of vader's battle tactics. perhaps because he too relies on a pressure suit and breathing device to survive in the same atmosphere as most humans, tambor doesn't need static blueprints of the suit -- he has no intention of shutting down vader's life support. the difference in method is only a subtle one, however: he too is targeting vader's dependency on his armor. in lieu of a direct attack, he means to target the suit's limitations indirectly, to swarm vader with the very droids he once demolished and have them target his limited mobility, his repetitious set of moves within the suit's confines. with his reliance on surveillance technology, tambor is only the latest in a long line to act on the premise that vader's demise is a given because he has no secrets left.

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak, Ross, et al

if it seems a blind spot that tambor hasn't collected archival footage of anakin on a droid rampage, he's nonetheless managed to address it thanks to a chance encounter. when padmé's former body double -- sabé, vader's double in the comic, a shadow of the shadow -- arrives on vader's orders to kill tambor, then tries to convince him to abandon a plan that she fears will only get hundreds killed, he captures her. tambor rightly recognizes that sabé is more to vader than an agent skilled in deception and lies: she represents his weakness, he believes, a reading that vader himself may even share.

sabé is the bright note in this story of decline, the one character who cares enough and dares enough to consider vader's "weakness" a possible strength. like the reconstituted droids, she is in her own way a dead woman brought back to life, a ghost -- padmé back from the grave to haunt him, as she tells vader upon their first meeting. like any good ghost, she wants revenge for padmé's death and to enact her final, unfulfilled wish; as it happens, killing vader to save anakin would neatly accomplish both. (as it happens, she and vader have both seen recorded footage of padmé's last moments; tambor's recordings of vader from the perspective of dying droids is both a parallel and a contrast to padmé, shown dying from wounds inflicted by an absent vader, whispering of the good still in him.) when sabé freely enters his service, claiming she wants to help, vader is troubled -- does this make him weak? -- and yet also quite smug. here is finally someone who has chosen him of their own free will; here is someone who has accepted his offer of power; here is someone who looks and talks just like the dead wife he's convinced himself would have stood with him and espoused his cause ("order"). (indeed, she wields real power -- jealous and fearful, the assassin ochi effectively portrays her as a tiger handler who unleashes her pet when she wants someone dead.) it's a fantasy come to life.

yet sabé is not dead, present as she may as ghost or shadow or fantasy -- sabé is herself haunted: haunted by padmé, whom she could not save, and by anakin, whose mother she could not free. sabé is herself a killer whose guilt and loyalty and poisoned grief have moved her to try and execute vader "for padmé and anakin", and who gets a real chance -- closer than anyone but palpatine -- to put vader to death. sabé's attempts to kill vader have evolved with time -- a first attempt, imaginative but unrefined, made when she unequivocally thought him anakin and padmé's murderer, involved luring vader into an underwater lair, provoking him into claiming he killed anakin and padmé, and feeding him to a massive sea monster. a second, disastrous attempt led to the pointless slaughter of her ground and aerial troops, though vader left her and padmé's remaining former handmaidens alive. (unbeknownst to her, the emperor nearly killed vader for that choice, leaving him deprived of all but his arm and core suit functionality on the burning banks of mustafar, to relive obi-wan's abandonment and crawl his way through the corpses of murdered separatists, into and out of death.) she comes closest to actually killing him, however, only after she's had such an effect on him that she's moved him to confront his great nemesis (sand) to save her life and bring himself to the brink of death on behalf of a refugee camp composed of freed tatooine slaves. having fried his suit -- through the bounceback of his own hubris, ultimately -- vader lies incapacitated on the ground when sabé finds him and reveals her own fantasy involves killing him. her ghosts hold her back; padmé stays her hand.

of the humiliations heaped upon him since luke's escape, including the routine of hanging head-down and mostly naked in a bacta tank flanked by observing guards, only this -- this grave insistence from padmé there is good in him -- manages to shake vader.

Darth Vader (2020-) #28, Pak/Ienco/et al -- Vader conjures the elephant of his diminishing power as he dangles hulkingly in his bacta tank in full sight of two guards. Subsequently, he shatters the bacta tank in rage.

unlike the attacks riffed from public records, the private knowledge padmé possessed as she died is one that no one else can see. even sabé admits she can't understand why she chooses to trust it. as for vader's master, we never see him overhearing the padmé recording, he never cites it directly (though he does mock vader for "listening ... to your heart", perhaps a way of dismissing its importance). as in the panopticon the prisoners never know when they are observed, so too does the emperor presumably turn his eye away from time to time, all too certain the name "anakin" has lost all "power" over vader. as in the prison of andor "no one is listening", there is still the quality of a secret in what vader and sabé know about padmé. even if, in his fear of weakness, all vader can see in that secret is death.

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