Star Wars: Darth Vader #3 More Evil, Less Powerful

It should go without saying but there are spoilers below, my essays are for people who have read the issue and want to talk more deeply about themes, canon and plot. There is also a light spoiler for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but you already watched that. You can read previous installments of essays based on the Darth Vader series written by Charles Soule through the links below.

Darth Vader #1

Darth Vader #2

In issue 3, Darth Vader scribe Charles Soule introduces us to a fun new character name Kirak Infil’a. Kirak Infil’a has taken something called the Barash Vow. Many believed that Luke Skywalker may have taken this vow and is why he disappeared from the galaxy to live on an island sitting on an almost unfindable planet. I’ll leave that discussion for another article.

Darth Vader is looking for a Jedi so he can kill them, steal their lightsaber and corrupt the kyber crystal inside. This arc tells the story of how Darth Vader gets his red lightsaber. See the essay on the first issue for more on that.

The Barash Vow is a self-imposed exile that about fourteen-thousand Jedi in the history of the Jedi order have imposed on themselves. According to Darth Vader in issue two:

“Any Jedi pursuing Barash has sworn to refrain from activities related to the order. Complete disengagement from anything but the force. It is a type of penance.”

In a galaxy and time period where Jedi are scarce due to the recent near genocidal Order 66, pursuers of Barash are the easy answer to finding a Jedi. Unknown is why Palpatine didn’t consider the handful of Jedi that might still be out there under this vow or if he even knew about the Barash Vow. Nonetheless, Master Kirak Infil’a is a great character and worth our time. He has foregone things like politics and has focused only combat and that’s what he’s doing when he is introduced in this third issue.

Darth Vader is a bad guy, one of the most evil and most recognizable villains in our current culture and a character popular enough that needs a comic with him as the focus. The antagonist as protagonist theme gets full force in this issue as we see Vader have to take on a variety of obstacles in order to get to Master Infil’a. Somehow Soule has to humanize a character that, at this point in the saga, is becoming less and less human and floating further and further away from anything good or moral.

As this is mostly an action issue the obstacles the “hero” has to face make sense and fall in line with what we would see in a typical story staring Indiana Jones or even Ezra Bridger in the Rebels television show as he learns to be a Jedi in a world without a codified Jedi Order. With Vader, Soule needs to invert the camera and structure the story so that our protagonist villain is fighting and dealing with conflict despite the fact that we shouldn’t be able to connect with a character so evil.

But dead Anakin/young Darth Vader is a character with which a reader can identify. This is the Darth Vader that is hurt and in turmoil and is much more powerful than he realizes. This is only a step away from the brash but likable Anakin Skywalker of the Clone Wars television series (yeah yeah, not the prequels). I hope you can’t identify with Vader’s action, but the conflict and emotion are things a reader can identify with. That’s what makes this series so exciting. Darth Vader is a raw and evil power, but he’s a beginner at it all. His wife was murdered and in his eyes his best friend and mentor betrayed him. We have all felt that rage and sadness.

This issue shows that, although he is powerful, he is not unbeatable. We don’t often get to see a Darth Vader that can be defeated one on one, until now. Master Kirak Infil’a punks Vader in this issue. He actually beats his ass good and even decides that Vader couldn’t have killed all the Jedi himself because he “is too weak.” At the end of this issue he just throws Vader off of a cliff with his cybernetics destroyed and his metal leg broken. Many years of comic book reading and watching Wile E. Coyote should tell us that he’s not dead, also the fact that he’s alive in the original trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels and the Gillen’s Darth Vader comic set in between episodes four and five.

If they ever do a "What If?" series for Star Wars I’d love to one where Master Infil’a doesn’t just launch Vader off of a cliff. What if he finishes the job (which let’s be honest he won’t in the next issue) and then goes after Palpatine? What is important and what this issue gives us is a Vader that can be beaten up and it’s not something we’ll see very often going forward, in fact, this is the only series where we’ll have the opportunity to see it and a Star Wars fan should enjoy that.