Thanks! That's what I suspected, but it's hard to be sure .

I have to say, I never have read an Indiana Jones comic, while I find the movies decent, I just never felt the need to see more stories... I didn't realize how many comics existed of him!

I was never a huge fan of Tales of the Jedi myself, the time period is cool but I've always been turned off by the muddy art and the over use of hugely expository narration boxes. 

I'm a big TOTJ fan. Wasn't very fond of the comics during the '90s/early '00s, but they grew on me, in no small part due to how different they depict the Jedi/Sith compared to the prequels. I won't deny they have their flaws, just like Dark Empire. Still, I love the worldbuilding.

I hope you'll be covering TOTJ by publication order rather than chronological.

Tales of the Jedi #1



Cover dated : October 1993
Issue title : Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Anderon
Script: Tom Veitch
Pencils: Chris Gossett
Inks: Mike Barriero
Colors: Pamela Rambo
Letters: Willie Schubert
Cover art Dave Dorman
Overall rating: 7 out of 10


Summary : We start, as is often the case, with a training scene. There we meet the intrepid young Jedi in training Ulic Qel-Droma, along with his brother Cay and Tott Doneeta.. pupils of Master Arca. Ulic is taking on a training robot, and shows himself to be quite skilled but a bit brash and overconfident, and the robot ends up blasting him.



After a quick lesson Master Arca tells his students about the planet Onderon...where, due to scary dragon-like beasts that migrated from the moon, the people developed in a walled city... tossing criminals out to die. The criminals eventually tamed the beasts and banded together, so a state of war existed on the planet, so for their first mission Ulic and his fellows are assigned to Onderon to end the war.

They arrive and fly through a squad Beast Riders, who they just take the shots from and head to the palace of the 'civilized' types. At first they try to stop Tott from joining them (how is a Twi'lek... the people don't like aliens) but the Queen overrides her people's prejudices and sees all 3 jedi.

The queen looks 'older than her years' (hint, hint) and is sad she didn't get a Jedi Master. Ulic smooths it over and the Jedi get introduced to her daughter just as the Beast Riders attack. The Jedi help fight them off, but not before the Princess is kidnapped!



Cay and Tott want to consult Master Arca for advise, but Ulic is ready to save the princess, and off they go. The Beast Riders leave a surprise behind though... to be continued!




My Thoughts : I find this to be a pefectly passable, if unremarkable start to the story. About 1/3 of the story is an info dump, but it's not a terrible one, even if it seems an awful lot like the set up of the Dragonriders of Pern (just with the dragons being the bad guys instead of 'threads')

Ulic is just the sort of character people like to root for and no one is ever surprised about when he turns evil, which is fine but a bit telegraphed.... even the first time I read the story it was clear things weren't going to go well for him. Cay is the tech geek of the team, and Tott seems to exist solely so they could point on the Onderonians don't like aliens.. hopefully he'll not just be wallpaper (though since I totally forget he exists he might not do much).

I LOVE this cover, and I'm not the only one as I feel like it's been used a lot. Dave Dorman has decided that light sabers are not flashlights, which is nice.

All 3 young jedi have similar sabers... all yellow blades of similar design. It seems the color thing isn't really a thing here.

No back matter in this one, but there is a letters page and an intro page. The intro page mentions this is a story from THE Jedi Holocron (still implying there is just the one). The new editor mentions the BBS again, and doesn't mention the fact that it took a year since Dark Empire for this to come out (that definitely didn't seem to be the plan). It is also mentioned that a Dark Empire Sequel is coming soon, and a 'Dark Lords of the Sith' series will follow this one.

It nice to have normal coloring again.. this art isn't as good as Kennedy, but it's decent and certainly doesn't detract from the story.

Continuity notes: Onderon is of course a very important location throughout the Tales of the Jedi comics.. this is its first mention. In 'current' times, it's also where Saw Guerra hides out. The internet tells me that these stories are sort of in the Disney canon.. they've been mentioned and told to the Jedi younglings almost as fables and cautionary tales, but not implicitly stated as facts.

The old queen tries to do... something... that fails. Between that and the extra wrinkles they seem to be implying she's a dark side user, and 2 of the 3 jedi (but of course not Ulic) are suspicious of her.


This timeline ('Millenia ago' in the comic, but sometime there must be a specific reference to 4000 years ago, as that seems to be what most sources quote) seems very different from the High Republic one, which makes the Jedi Order feel much younger and the Galaxy much smaller. I know we've talked about that before in talking about the TV shows, but here is a great example of how to NOT make the galaxy seem small.. this is a new, previously unexplored bit of the galaxy with a rich history we are about to learn about.

I MUCH prefer this to the recent nonsense.

I liked "Tales of the Jedi" and all the stuff. Sadly, the prequel theory and the KOTOR games were nothing like that.

The first thing to mention is that I'd forgotten that this mini-series was written by Tom Veitch. I guess that accounts for the amount of TotJ worldbuilding that we saw in Dark Empire. Anyway, yeah…that fact had completely slipped my mind, but then I guess I probably haven't read these comics since the late '90s.





As a little aside, I always thought that the training droid Ulic Qel-Droma is seen battling here had a somewhat similar design to FE-9Q from the early issues of Marvel's old Star Wars comic. I always figured that was a deliberate homage on Chris Gossett's part and quite a nice touch (though it may not have been deliberate, of course).

Here's FE-9Q, with her owner Jim the Starkiller Kid, for comparison…







Shades of Mega City One from Judge Dredd, where they exiled their worst criminals and mutants to the Cursed Earth.





Having the Princess kidnapped and having the trio of young heroes attempt to rescue her is reminiscent of elements of Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope.





I agree, except to say that this issue does have me hooked enough to want to read the next one. I remember pretty much nothing of the plot of this mini-series, so it's going to be interesting re-reading along with your reviews. I was never terribly impressed with TofJ at the time, I must say – hence why I haven't re-read this since the late '90s – but I actually enjoyed re-reading this first instalment way more than I was expecting to. It's better than I remembered it, even if it's not exactly blowing me away either.





A serious criticism of this first issue would be that so much of it was an 'info dump' and was concerned with establishing the story, that there was barely any time to get into characterisation of the three young Jedi. Cay Qel-Droma and Tott Doneeta seem utterly characterless at this early stage, other than Doneeta is a bit grumpy and Cay is more cautious that his brother.

As for Ulic – Hey, man…spoilers!! – I don't remember him turning evil! That doesn't happen in this mini-series or The Freedon Nadd Uprising, right? I guess this must happen in a later story arc. If I'm wrong about that, then I'd forgotten more than I thought about these first couple of TotJ mini-series.





I thought The Freedon Nadd Uprising came after this first mini-series??? With Dark Lords of the Sith being the third story.





On balance, I agree that the art isn't as good as Cam Kennedy's, but Gossett's artwork has a slightly '90s indie comic aesthetic to it, which I really like. It's also quite nicely detailed and is easy to follow panel-to-panel. It's pretty good stuff, overall. It's more traditional comic book art than Kennedy's, as you say, and Pamela Rambo's colouring is much more realistic and less stylised too.

On a related matter, I always thought that the young Jedi's ship, the Nebulon Ranger, had a really cool, but rather unorthodox ship design. I like that the ships here don't look like the ones we'd seen during the era of the Empire.





I agree wholeheartedly. I think the thing I liked best about the whole Tales of the Jedi setting is that it was the first Star Wars comic to not have been tied to the Star Wars films and their central characters. It opened up a lot of story possibilities.

Back when I first read this mini-series in 1993, it felt simultaneously liberating and intriguingly exotic in the way it introduced us to a slew of new characters from a time period many thousands of years before the original trilogy. That said, the unfamiliar setting has its drawbacks, and I can vividly recall wishing that this series had instead been set just prior to the rise of the Empire and had focused on Obi-Wan and Anakin et al. I'm sure Lucasfilm would've torpedoed that idea if it had ever been proposed, but those were my thoughts at the time.