Marvel will be relaunching the “Darth Vader” ongoing series with writer Charles Soule and artist Giuseppe Camuncoli on board. The new series will take place right after Revenge of the Sith, literally starting seconds after the last moments of the film. Soule likens this era of Vader and his take on him to “Batman: Year One.” “We see him learning to be more machine than man.” Soule elaborates, “We see him going through some really, really cool early moments of his early mythology and history.”
The first milestone in Vader’s journey the series will tackle is the origin of Vader’s iconic red lightsaber. It will also dig into some of the lightsaber mythology, an area that has not been touched on much in the new canon and Soule seems very enthusiastic to explore it. “So, we end up with a character who is known as having this iconic sword, like his magical red sword, but he doesn’t have it yet. So what better way to start a big huge series than with a quest for a magic sword?”
Soule and Camuncoli have some big shoes to fill after the well-loved 25 issue run by Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larocca that wrapped up last year. Soule emphasizes that this is a very different Vader then we’ve seen before. “I would say that in Kieron’s series, you had a man who had been doing that job and was sort of accustomed to his reality in a way that this Vader is not. So, [in this new series] the fire is burning very, very bright in terms of his hatred and anger and the things he’s trying to work through. He’s trying to understand himself, whereas Vader in Gillen’s series was almost sort of an older crocodile that’s been around for a long, long time and has no real enemies or challenges.”
“Darth Vader” #1 will be released in June.
