Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The Menace Revealed Vol. 1

As a title “The Menace Revealed” is a bit on the nose and not strictly true.The heart of this Legends Epic collection is issues of the continuing “Star Wars” comic originally published by Dark Horse while the SW prequel movies were in theatres. They happen after The Phantom Menace, but don’t “reveal” anything.Don’t be put off that the content is no longer “official” Star Wars continuity. The stories parallel the movie timeline and there are familiar faces but not the central characters, presumably in an effort not to contradict evolving film storylines, so there’s little or no impact on continuity to worry about.Any major continuity issues are pretty much limited to the “Jango Fett Open Seasons” miniseries which opens the book. It’s an attempt to add sympathetic flesh to the plot-serving black hat from Episode 2, with details of his mercenary career and selection as Clone Zero, which slots into movie continuity backwards from reveals in Episode 2 but “happens” before or around Episode 1. And it mostly sucks.The story’s too wound up in a spiral of flashbacks that jumbles the cast too much for a casual read and the fussy, cartoonish art is a bad fit for the story. There are continuity issues with the abandoned idea of Mandalorians as a rag-tag, mongrel band of Foreign Legion mercs and not the more recently ret-conned hereditary hoo-raa space marines.The rest of the book is much better.Two multi-part stories and a one-shot follow the Chancellor Palpatine era Jedi council doing its day job. The first takes Ki-Adi-Mundi, the one with the big pointy head, to Tatooine looking for a Jedi turned Tusken raider and finding a new part-Tusken padawan. The second takes half the council to arbitrate a peace treaty on pod-racer Sebulba’s homeworld during the biggest pod-race in the galaxy.The pod race story is mainly an excuse for comedy pratfalls during the race, hobbled by the mistaken idea that commentators Fode and Beed weren’t just funny the first time but needed bringing back.The final one-shot episode takes Mace Windu to smuggler’s moon Nar Shadda to stop abuse of animals illegally exported from his homeworld.The acceptable but unexceptional art from several hands swings from more straight-laced to cartoonish as you’d expect.In real-world terms these stories probably aren’t any more or less “canon” than the new Marvel material back-filling gaps around the original trilogy.On balance, more was good than not, so 5 stars.