Joining the expanded Star Wars universe is the manga adaptation of Star Wars Lost Stars, a bildungsroman about Imperial cadets. Lost Stars possesses not only appealing line art, but the Star Wars aesthetic, which includes a sense not only of Star Wars design and geography, but of set, shot and scene, for there are a few scenes lifted with care from Star Wars: A New Hope. If given a checklist of elements to include in this inception of Episode IV, Gray checked these boxes: Death Star, Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, Alderaan, Princess Leia, C-3PO, R2D2. That these characters are all in the “Death Star Family” should call to mind another famous exploration of past Star Wars continuity.

Like Star Wars: Rogue One, the ambition of Lost Stars is not only to craft an original narrative with the Star Wars feel, but to insert a bubble narrative into the echoes of past continuity, thus layering this thinly-crafted story like onionskin over the ironclad memories of Star Wars fandom, perhaps in the hope that its readers will penetrate the Star Wars universe not only as they first lived it, but as they have continued to recreate it with each viewing.

Unlike the well-realized tableau of Rogue One, in Lost Stars, there is the sense that the writer is not opening a story, but a vintage playset, which he or she plays with most respectfully, before putting the characters back in their plastic cubes and closing the playset without leaving a mark that might knock it down from mint in box. Just as those at play with toys will break with established character according to their whim, swapping Lego heads and the like, so Gray couldn’t resist the temptation, when faced with one of the key heavies of the first Star Wars film, Grand Moff Tarkin, to take the Grand literally and make Tarkin as grandfatherly as he looks.

While Star Wars: A New Hope leaned heavily into Tarkin’s bad side, showing his sinister smile, his satisfaction at demolishing Alderaan, and his fetishistic sadism that he enjoyed vicariously through hypo-armed interrogation robots, in Lost Souls, the kindly Grandpa / Fairy Grandpa smiles on the bullied heroes, then rewards their bravery with a spaceship tour. While it’s amusing to think of Grand Moff Tarkin with a sideline as a Victorian benefactress that looks in on his distant charges from time to time, so that he can select the best street urchin to inherit the Death Star, I can’t reconcile this to the cruel, crotchety old man that followed a phallic droid into Princess Leia’s cell. Fleshing out a dark patriarch like this feels like a propaganda reel–I don’t need to know that the brutal dictator plays golf or that the planetary destroyer and robot sadist has a soft spot for plucky kids. It plays false, and runs contrary to character. We can’t make Mary Poppins a cannibal or Lex Luthor a barista outside of comedy sketches.

Where Lost Stars partially succeeds is in its admittedly heavyhanded story of racism and classism on Jelucan. While Gray creates an obvious racial contrast between the black First Wave and the white Second Wave of Jelucan, Thane and Ciena’s homeworld, many other lines separate the kind, hardworking, and sincere First Wave, and the slick, bratty, gold-digging, internet trolls of the Second Wave. The lines are drawn with cleaner definition than in a clashing Twitter thread, so that you know that the MAGA-wearing, NIKE-burning Second Wavers are the heavies on this planet, and the sinister paternalism of Grandpa Tarkin, Dark Father, and The Emperor is a step up from the stark apartheid on Jelucan. That the Empire is an agent of racial and cultural unity, at least on Jelucan, providing not only a rite of passage but a proving ground for recruits of varying backgrounds, is an interesting and original take on the Empire, and it is almost as if the writer racked their brain to find a situation in which the Empire could be seen to do some good, if only by contrast. As if Lost Stars was founded on the false adage that “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” To save you the effort of digging up google holes, this is the bad idea that though the Nazis were bad, you can’t say they didn’t do any good, because certainly there were Nazi soldiers that only unclogged toilets, cooked meals, ran trains, and paved roads. Grand Moff Tarkin sics probing droids on princess and destroys planets with probing death rays, but at least he was instrumental in giving Thane and Ciera a magic carpet ride, so that they could get their lyrical Lost Stars adventure.

To be fair, I would probably watch a musical version of this in which Grand Moff Tarkin starts belting out “Whole New World,” putting a fascist slant on such lyrics as “A new fantastic point of view / No one to tell us no / Or where to go…” And while I couldn’t take Lost Stars seriously, it was eminently readable. As entertainment, it holds up, but as meaningful entertainment–such as the Star Wars movies it seeks to emulate–it can’t compare.

star wars lost stars

Yen Press sent the review copy.