As The Rise of Skywalker brings the Star Wars saga to its official close, now seems like a great time to revisit the very first chapter in the series. The Phantom Menace, which graced screens in 1999, made the leap to print the following year, with Kia Asamiya providing the illustrations. Readers familiar with Asamiya’s Silent Möbius will immediately understand why he was tapped for this project: he has a penchant for drawing detailed space ships and cityscapes, two important qualifications for translating George Lucas’ vision into a compelling comic. Alas, Asamiya was also saddled with Lucas’ original script, leaving him little room to make the story more interesting on the page than it was on the screen. Asamiya faithfully preserves the film’s most frustrating elements—the tin-eared dialogue, the unfortunate minstrelsy...
Jan 6, 2020 • Subscribe
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