Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Almost every Star Wars comic borrows its cast. Knights of the Old Republic does not. It opens four thousand years before the films with a Padawan nobody has heard of being blamed for a massacre nobody has heard of, and it earns every reader it gets.

The plot actually works

This is rarer than it sounds. John Jackson Miller wrote the whole run to a plan: the frame-up in issue #1 has a specific motive, that motive is revealed on a schedule, and the consequences compound. Zayne Carrick is a bad Jedi and a good detective, which is a much more interesting thing to be, and the supporting cast — Gryph the Snivvian fixer, Jarael, Camper, the labour droid Elbee, the Mandalorian Rohlan Dyre — are given arcs rather than running gags.

What it is not

It is not a game adaptation. It shares a setting with BioWare's 2003 game and almost nothing else, and you can read all fifty issues without having played a minute of it. Brian Ching's art is clean and warm, which suits a book whose default register is comedy sitting on top of a genuine tragedy.

Where it sits

It is Legends, and it always will be. It is also the single best argument that the Old Republic era was worth building — a setting invented for Tales of the Jedi thirteen years earlier and finally given a story that uses it.