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CLONE WARS

TOBY FINCH

Well, it can hardly have escaped your attention that the Clone Wars are upon us, and also that it is hardly the fireballs-to-the-wall explodathon of ultra-hardcore cosmic kickassery we have waited thirty-odd years for.

Not that we should be surprised. After all, the first piece Star Wars fiction we ever saw that was set before the events of the first film was even more underwhelming. It came in (unsurprisingly) Marvel Comic's 'Star Wars', Issue 24, June 1979, and consists of a flashback to Obi-Wan Kenobi's days as a General of the pre-imperial Old Republic.

Every flashback of course needs a present to flash back from, and thus in order to relieve the boredom of a long space journey aboard the Millennium Falcon in which our heroes have little more than blasting TIE-fighters out of existence for distraction, Princess Leia decides to show them the true meaning of tedium by regaling them with the tale of an episode of ol' Ben's life so yawnsome that it must have made his years living as a hermit seem heart-burstingly exciting by comparison.

However, before moving on to the main story, we must pause to note the wholly spectacular chins of the menfolk. Luke sports a jawline that you could break boulders on, whilst Han's could dam a major river. For a lady, Leia's is pretty impressive too, but is rather overshadowed by the fact that she appears to have a couple of car tyres stuck to her head, and is equipped with a chest that looks like a dead-heat in a zeppelin race.

Mind you, none of them looks so bizarre as Obi-Wan himself, who on the cover manhandles a throbbing pink lightsabre and is draped in flowing purple - colours of outfit and accessory that hint toward his keen interest in the lovely young Luke in the original movie.

But within the comic itself General Kenobi actually dresses like a general. And looks nothing like Alec Guinness. Or even wee Ewan McGregor for that matter. He does however look eerily like another military man - Colonel Sanders.

Which is somewhat appropriate, since he goes from out the deep fat fryer and into the fire fight as (once again) he gets into another bar fight which (once again) he resolves with the judicious use of a kind word and lethal force. He should be the mascot of overenthusiastic nightclub bouncers everywhere.

Indeed, the whole story seems to a be a rather heavy-handed parable about the evils of the demon drink, as the various outlandish occupants of a luxury starcrusier upon which Ben is taking the intergalactic equivalent of Saga holiday (and which to seems to consist of little more than one great unending bar) are harassed by the pursuit ships of some naughty slavers.

The various chinless wonders (I'm spotting a trend here; the bigger the chin, the better the person - Yoda would have a face like a snow plough) propping up the above-mentioned never-ending bar blame Ben's droid companion/luggage, 68-RKO (geddit?) for transmitting a signal that is attracting the bad guys. But Ben thinks it's actually the drinks vending machine. How does he know this? Well that's never quite explained, but since the space-stalkers give up and go away once he's impaled the unfortunate device with his lightsabre, the facts would appear to bear him out.

Pausing only not to wonder at all about who might have planted the homing device in the first place, Ben retires to his cabin to look forwards to bending the ear of his good buddy Bail Organa on Alderaan about the whole grindingly dismal affair.

Sometimes, when I lie awake at night haunted by 'a million voices all crying out at once, then suddenly silenced' I like to think that Ben's stultifying story was propagated throughout all Alderaan, and that therefore all Alderaan's fiery demise at the disintegratey end of the Death Star's superlaser actually came as a blessed relief.

It's not much to strike back at a purely phantom menace, but remains nevertheless a new hope.