Comic review: Darth Vader #1- The Glorification of a Psychopath

Writer bot: Keiron Gillen
Artist: Salvador Larroca
Publisher: Marvel (Disney)
Released: 11th February 2015



I’m not going to slaughter this book, as I knew exactly what I was going to get before I read it.

Here’s a Marvel (Disney) mainstream corporate whore comic book written by a writer (Kieron Gillen) who is so unmemorable that I cannot recall any of his previous work, even though he’s been writing mainstream comic books for many years now.

Gillen, Bendis, Fraction, Waid, Snyder, Slott, Aaron, Parker, Lemire, Hickman and all the rest of them working in the mainstream are pretty much the same. They concentrate on characters and plot, conform to the politically correct norms that the neo-liberal globalist consensus dictates, and pump out unit shifter after unit shifter without offending, and without saying a single useful thing about the state of the world as it is today. That’s okay, they have every right to do that, but I also have every right to not buy their books, and that is what I do, with the odd exception of course.

So when I get Darth Vader #1 by writer bot no 24445 Gillen I don’t exactly expect it to be subtly dealing with geo-political issues. I don’t expect clever references to contemporary surveillance state concerns, privacy issues, corporate crime, illegal foreign wars based on lies, the funding of international terrorism and all of the other sick things that democratic western elites are getting up to today.

What I do expect from a corporation like Marvel/Disney is a book that ignores all of the things that an intelligent, brave, moral and truth centred writer would discuss, and instead to focus the reader’s attention on trivial personality issues involving the cult of personality toybox stars that were created a long, long time ago, and maximised for corporate profit ever since.

That’s exactly what I get in Darth Vader #1, so no surprises. We follow Vader as he interacts with some of the more successful villains of the franchise (Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt, the Emperor) and I guess the enjoyment to be had is the ‘Wow, that was cool’ factor as we see large panels of him standing in Jabba's palace and deftly avoiding the trap-door that leads to that big lizard monster thing that Jabba feeds his victims to. Is it fun? Kind of, on a surface level, but let’s delve a bit deeper here.

Who are we supposed to be empathising with here? It’s Darth Vader, right? He’s the name on the cover, and it’s his story that the book is following as he attempts to salvage his career in the evil empire after the right balls up he made with the Death star being blown to bits. Is he supposed to be a sympathetic character though? In this book he is a psychopath in a black uniform randomly murdering people in a stylised ‘cool’ manner in order to get his career moving again, and to settle old personal scores.

That’s the worst kind of person, right? That is the kind of person who has no problems machine gunning civilians or leading naked prisoners into gas chambers. It’s the kind of person who happily follows orders, thinking only of himself and perhaps a possible promotion if he gets the job of mass murder done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

That is who Darth Vader is, and that is exactly how he is written in this book, so writer bot 24445 Gillen has to be congratulated on that point. What he needs to be called out on however is that he makes Vader’s actions look cool, he makes them look like they are the actions of a strong, powerful individual and not what they actually are, the actions of a weak, order following snivelling coward.

The impression that what Vader is doing here is super cool, awesome man, high five dude is helped along by the artwork where order following Darth is portrayed in the most flattering light possible. He’s big, he’s heroic, and he’s a super cool badass.

Yeah, and he’s also a cold, callous, in it only for himself secondary (made, not born) psychopath, so perhaps we shouldn’t be glorifying the guy, right?

So that’s the book. More glorification of the worst kind of person, the kind of person that the corporate elite’s rely upon to maintain the status quo in the world as it is today. A world owned and controlled by a tiny number of corporate/banking elites, and kept in murderous disorder by their bought and paid for gangs of order following mass murdering career obsessed psychopaths in black uniforms.

All of this will of course fly over the heads of the majority of comic book readers (and fanboy writer bots) as they act like children and praise the book for being cool, and Boba Fett is in it, and wow, that was like totally awesome, yawn. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Take a step back, take a deep breath of air, look at the world, and then read the book again. It’s the glorification of a Police state psychopath, and the plot is the same old stuff that Dark Horse was doing with a browbeaten and angry Vader trying to prove his worth to the Emperor, it’s not good, not good at all.

Rating: 4/10 (Slightly below average corporate, neo-liberal, police state comic book)