Mirror:

Star Wars comics had a big footprint in the 90s, with Dark Horse publishing a number of series. One was the X-Wing Rogue Squadron books, and I am going to go through the third arc, 1996’s Battleground Tatootine. Story by Michael A. Stackpole, pencil art by John Nadeau, ink by Jodri Ensign, color by Dave Nestelle & Perry McNamee, lettering by Vickie Williams, and cover art by John Snyder III.

This comic is full throttle 90s cheese. Attitude, badditude, and a plot that makes absolutely no sense.

It starts off with Wedge Antilles being shown bodycam footage of a conman on Tatootine being blown away by stormtroopers while insisting that he had high level Imperial connections.

Rogue Squadron is sent to Tatootine to help the New Republic’s agent Winter who is already on the case.

The squadron meets up with Winter who suspects that a local businessman, the father of the late Alliance pilot Biggs Darklighter may be involved. Winter poses as a naive merchant who had been saved by Rogue Squadron.

Biggs’ father is holding a memorial for his son and Winter brings along some members of Rogue Squadron with the intention of breaking into the Darklighter estate’s safe and recovering a data disc relating to the conman who had been killed.

However before Winters can put her party crashing distraction into motion, the event is interrupted by raiders turning the whole place into a firefight. The raiders get to the safe before Winters and escape with the disc.

When Biggs’ father is confronted about what happened he admits that the disc contained information on hidden Imperial weapon caches on Tatootine which he had been using to make money off of. He gives Rogue Squadron a copy of the disc, and in quaint 90s fashion, the passwords to unlock various files are the different aliases the conman had used. Rogue Squadron is able to see an inventory which includes as fully outfitted prototype Imperial Strike Cruiser warship named the Eidolon, but they don’t know how to unlock the file that will show the ship’s location.

Meanwhile the raiders from the party turn the disc over to their employer, a Twi’lek crime boss named Firith Olan. Firith wants the Eidolon so that he can do more biggerer crime stuff. Rogue Squadron tracks Firith down thanks to local businessman Darklighter having high resolution CIA spy satellites in orbit. Taking to their X-Wings they confront Firith’s sizable squadron of TIE Interceptors borrowed from one of the Imperial caches. While the dogfight is going on, an Imperial Remnant Star Destroyer shows up and sends its TIE fighters into the mix. Firith escapes into hyperspace.

Both Rogue Squadron and the Imperial Remnant immediately know he has gone to the Twi’lek homeworld of Ryloth for sanctuary.

On Ryloth, Firith’s clan isn’t thrilled to see him, and both the New Republic and Imperials are vying for Firith by offering sizable payments. I want to remind everybody that the New Republic and Imperials are supposed to be looking for the warship Eidolon, and the New Republic already has the data disc. Firith doesn’t have any information about the password, so getting hold of him does nothing to further their search.

Anyway, the Twi’leks are open to turning Firith in to one side, but rather than just selling him to the highest bidder they organize a game for, apparently, nothing more than their own amusement.

The Imperial Remnant send in their best men: Imperial Special Forces. These guys are basically Klingons bursting out of stormtrooper armor. They go up against Rogue Squadron in a head to head contest.

They encounter a few setbacks.

However in the end they easily win.

Then both they and Rogue Squadron are killed in a fiery surface storm on Ryloth.

Until it is revealed that the contest was all a VR simulation and that fortunately if you die in the game you don’t die in real life.

The Twi’leks are ready to sell Firith to the Imperials until a “mysterious figure” (he’s obviously just the Imperial captain) offers Firith a way out. So, wait. The Imperials were going to get the person they wanted, by then their captain sabotages his troops and leaves them stranded so that he can make sure that the Imperials get the person they wanted. Okay then.

The Imperial Special Forces troopers declare their captain is a P’takh with no honor, and he has made an enemy for life. They team up with Rogue Squadron and head back to Tatootine.

They get introduced to the rest of the team.

The story then shows the Imperial captain with Firith and drops the big reveal. The Eidolon wasn’t a warship, that was just a cover story. The reality is that it is a secret off-the-books Imperial base. The Captain knew the location the whole time! He didn’t need Firith to find this thing! The reason he went to all the effort, and the reason he sacrificed his irreplaceable Special Forces troopers was to recover Firith so he could put him in charge of managing the base day to day while he was away. Everybody following?

This captain thinks it is a good idea to put a shifty and obviously untrustworthy crime lord in charge of a massive weapons cache, with no oversight. Even then, why does it specifically have to be Firith? Tatootine’s single biggest export are scumbag criminals. He couldn’t find somebody else to fit his criteria?

So then Rogue Squadron flies X-Wings at the base to battle its TIE Interceptors, while Imperial Special Forces land inside for a ground assault.

In orbit, the Imperial Star Destroyer provides moral support until a member of Rogue Squadron flies inside and hits it for critical damage.

The Special Forces find the captain and turn him in a smear.

Firith barely manages to escape the chaos but finds himself face to face with the spider droid assistant he has had throughout the comic.

The spiderdroid has the brain of Bib Fortuna by the way. That’s not a reveal, I just didn’t know where else to mention it. Somehow offscreen, Spider Fortuna overpowers Firith, brings him back to Jabba’s old palace, and switches his brain into Firith’s body. That is the end, I guess.

This comic is complete nonsense and I love it. Ever since I first read it, the image of burly action heroes in partial stormtrooper armor has stuck with me. The art of the dogfights between X-Wings and various TIEs is just so timeless. At the time I read this comic I was starting to really get into drawing comic style art and I completely stole the perspective view of the torpedoes with winding trailing exhaust. This comic is an artifact of the Star Wars EU existing at the height of edgy comics of the 90s and I wouldn’t have it any other way.