The now seemingly annual Star Wars mega-crossover has arrived in 2023, with the beginning of Dark Droids.

Following the conclusion of Hidden Empire, it seems that Lady Qi’ra – a character who’s been massively expanded upon in Star Wars comics, after only appearing in live action in Solo: A Star Wars Story – has unwittingly released an ancient, malevolent entity.

As the opening crawl of Dark Droids #1 tells us: first it comes for the metal, then it comes for everything else.

This is a fairly intriguing issue, which sees large numbers of droids infected by this entity and turning on their organic masters.

It’s effectively creepy and builds up the tension nicely, with a neat cliffhanger that brings the horror to a very familiar and usually very friendly droid.

Yet the real horror occurs on the page after the story’s conclusion.

Allow me to demonstrate with the accompanying image.

Having endured one of these Star Wars mega crossovers before – hello, War of the Bounty Hunters – nothing is as immediately exhausting as looking at an upcoming release schedule that shows just how many tie-in issues need to be read in order to get the ‘full’ story.

And yet years of experience has shown me that, though these crossovers almost always start with an intriguing, attention grabbing premise, they are unable to sustain their momentum over such a long period – and their hijacking of every other comic in the Star Wars line always leads to confusion if you’re not already regularly reading every title currently being published.

What makes it even worse for these comics than, say, a superhero-led Marvel crossover is that the Star Wars crossovers are usually set during a period of continuity in which the end point and the fate of all major characters is already known.

In fact, even the fate of – or at least the position of – minor characters beyond this crossover is known, seeing as it’s set before Return of the Jedi.

So ultimately: what’s the point? The status quo will not be meaningfully changed. Few characters, except those originating in the comics, can be affected in any significant way either.

So as intriguing and potentially shocking as the cliffhanger is in this issue, we know that things will turn out fine for every major and minor character we already know.

This supposed ‘first Star Wars horror’ is rendered somewhat flat as a result, already.

With 28 more chapters on the way, I think I’m already done here. If you’re already invested in all of the current Star Wars line, your mileage may vary; after all, you’ll only be adding the odd Dark Droids spin off here and there to your reading list.

For us more casual fans, however, it’s probably not worth bothering with, in all honesty.

There’s nothing wrong with the premise, the writing or the art of Dark Droids – but, having been burned by pointless crossovers before, I can already tell that this one is another that’s setting up to waste an awful lot of time and space on the road to Return of the Jedi.

Had this been its own, self-contained mini-series, it could have been a fun diversion and a unique, scary Star Wars adventure. The moment I saw that reading list, however, I jumped off.

As a great philosopher once said: ain’t nobody got time for that.

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