In Review: Star Wars (2020-) #39 – DROID DEATH TRAP!

Synopsis: DROID DEATH TRAP! – A DARK DROIDS TIE-IN! LANDO CALRISSIAN has finally gotten his hands on the ancient droid with the ability to save his old friend LOBOT from certain death. But before that can happen, they must escape JABBA THE HUTT’S PALACE on TATOOINE, which is swarming with evil droids hungry… …for droid blood!

The Story

Having run into Jabba’s pet Rancor in the last issue and also ran into a bunch of killer droids who are after Lobot. Lando, The ancient protocol droid who is helping them, and Lobot must navigate Jabba’s palace and escape. Thankfully, the old protocol droid who is going to help Lobot once they all manage to escape has memorized the entire layout of Jabba’s palace. However, the killer droids have also memorized the layout of Jabba’s palace and are closing in on Lando and his friends with every passing second.

The Artwork

Madibek Musabekov puts in a decent art shift on this issue and gives us some great visuals. The sequence of panels where Lobot gets taken over by the hostile droids makes for one of the most dramatic visuals to date in this droids tie-in series. I particularly liked how Lobot’s eyes changed as a result of him being under the control of the droids who are looking at cyborgs as the future of things. Another great sequence of panels is where we see a rather ticked-off Rancor laying waste to a load of killer droids near the start of the book. These two sequences are the types of moments that its easy to envision being in a feature film.

Overall

Charles Soule continues to bring us a really solid story that explores the friendship between Lando and Lobot while simultaneously giving us a lot of great action beats. We even have a brief moment in this issue where Lando pretty much apologizes to the frozen Han Solo for selling him out to Lord Vader.

Overall. A really fun issue that continues to fill in the gap between Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi. I only hope that we get a series of comics that follow these legacy characters through the events that took place after Jedi.