Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives this December to wrap up the Skywalker saga in style, answering all our questions that haven’t been addressed in previous movies along the way. Not everything can be squeezed into a single film, though, so Marvel Comics is on hand to clear up any lingering threads as the same month that Episode IX hits theaters, Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren drops on store shelves, revealing the backstory of Ben Solo.
There’s been a lot of fascination with how the son of Leia and Han Solo could turn out to be such an evil dude, and it looks like this comic will finally tell all. However, writer Charles Soule is aware that not every fan’s going to like what he’s come up with for the character’s backstory. While speaking at Fan Expo Toronto, the scribe talked about the challenges of writing Star Wars comics, saying:
“Any significant change in Star Wars, that isn’t just a little shade of a character that we know really well, it’s vetted to make sure that it feels like Star Wars, that it fits within the Star Wars Universe, that it balances within the story universe, and that isn’t in conflict with the Story Group. So you’re in this weird game of chess with invisible chess players, you can’t see the moves, and the only people who have a sense of the board are not really playing it with the story.”
Given that, there’s a huge amount of expectation in comics like The Rise of Kylo Ren that have to measure up to what fans have come up with by themselves. For this reason, Soule knows the choices he’s made won’t please everyone.
“Sometimes Star Wars stories are like telling a great story and having a great time playing in this sandbox. And other times, Star Wars jobs are like ‘OK, we’ll give you an incredibly key piece of the overall mythology that you have to nail.’ You guys would not be very happy with me if I screw this up. And everyone here might not be very happy with the choices that I made.”
Based on the fact that this comic even exists in the first place, we can perhaps deduce that The Rise of Skywalker won’t spend too much time exploring Kylo’s past. We’d expect at least some light to be shed on it, though, given that the Knights of Ren are fully expected to appear in the film. But it looks like the nuts and bolts of mapping out his life falls to Soule in his comic. Hopefully, then, it’ll satisfy most Star Wars fans even despite his warning.
