Charles Soule inherited an impossible brief: write Darth Vader in the years when he is least interesting, immediately after the suit goes on, with no Rebellion to fight, no son to hunt and a reader who has already seen him lose everything.
Bleeding the crystal
The first arc is the answer, and it is the single best idea anyone has had about Vader in comics. He has no lightsaber. Sith do not receive them; they take them. So the Emperor sends him to find a surviving Jedi, kill them, take the weapon and force the kyber crystal inside it to submit — to bleed it red. It converts an item of merchandise into a rite of murder, and it retroactively explains the colour of every Sith blade in the franchise without contradicting a frame of film.
Camuncoli
Giuseppe Camuncoli draws the whole run, which after the artist-rotation of most modern Marvel books is itself worth noting. His Vader is bigger than anyone else's — a slab of black with a cathedral sense of scale around it — and he is unusually good at the thing Star Wars comics normally fumble, which is making a lightsaber duel legible on a static page. The Mon Cala sequences in Burning Seas, with capital ships fighting underwater, are a genuine spectacle.
Where it strains
Fortress Vader is where opinions divide. Soule brings in Momin, a Sith artist whose mask carries his consciousness, and lets him design the castle on Mustafar as a machine for opening a door to the dead. It is bold, it is legitimately eerie, and it also asks the reader to accept a body-hopping aesthete as a major Sith figure roughly nine issues after we met him. The run's mythology outgrows its patience with itself; the last stretch has more ideas than pages.
The comparison with Gillen's run is unavoidable and instructive. Gillen wrote Vader as a political animal in a bureaucracy. Soule writes him as a religious one in a horror story. Gillen's is the better-constructed comic; Soule's is the one that adds something to the films.
Verdict
Read the first arc even if you read nothing else. It is a complete, self-contained argument about what a Sith is, drawn by the best Vader artist Marvel has employed, and the last page of issue #6 is one of the few moments in canon comics that earns its silence.
