Star Wars Hyperspace Stories: The Bad Batch #1 // Review
There’s a squad that’s going-in to try to flush-out a group of separatists. The squad in question has seen better days. (Crosshairs is firmly of the opinion that he’s the last fun person ON the squad.) To make matters worse, they are dealing with the fact that the separatists seem to be able to manufacture and endless supply of battle bots. There’s something more in the stronghold, though: they’re detecting organic life. A few beats later...they find out that the organic life in question is a squad of clones. Thus begins Star Wars Hyperspace Stories: The Bad Batch #1. Writer Michael Moreci and artist Resse Hannigan begin a four-part series for Dark Horse Comics with inker Elisabette D’Amico and colorist Michael Atiyeh.
The clones seem a bit less scattered than the squad that’s come to encounter them. Thankfully, they don’t exactly have to fight each other. They’re both there for the same thing and they’re goin to be able to work together to investigate. There’s a bunker that was being used by a scientist who was doing some strange experiments. Clone Force 99: “The Bad Batch” are in for an uneasy exploration of an underground complex.
Mordeci orchestrates all of the different elements of a military action drama with a salad sense of balance and poise. This is quite an accomplishment given of the size of the ensemble that's being explored. The intrigue settles-in around the edges of the action as characters are introduced and the story moves forward. Given all of the heavy-duty exposition and backstory that need to be delivered in the course of the first issue, it’s actually kind of surprising that the story ends-up being as appealing and engrossing as it is. Mordeci clearly knows what he’s doing with the script.
Hannigan frames the action with considerable attention to detail. As the visuals are true to the production design of the original film series, there isn’t a whole lot of detail to carve-in around the edges of the action. It remains a strange quirk of the Star Wars universe that so much of the visuals are based on sets designed with huge chunks of cardboard that had been treated with hairspray in order to look like...a wall on the Death Star for example. The sleek and stark futuristic squalor is brought to the page quite respectaly with lines that are cleverly fused to page and panel by the deft ink work of D’Amico and then given life and texture by Atiyeh’s colors.
The plot DOES have a lot going for it. There are a lot of moving parts in the background of the story. The strange thing about this is that fact tht so much of the action in the center of the panel feels more or less indistinguishable from the blaster gunfights with armored guards and monsters that have been ricocheting around the Star Wars universe for nearly half a centruy now. That it remains appealing for this particular series is quite an accomplishment for everyone involved.
