Poe Dameron had the hardest job in Marvel's line and the least room to do it. It launched between two films whose contents it could not affect, starring a character whose entire arc was scheduled to happen on screen, and it was expected to run monthly for two and a half years anyway.
What works
Agent Terex works. Soule's antagonist is a former stormtrooper turned crime boss turned First Order security agent who collects Imperial memorabilia and treats Poe as a worthy opponent he has been waiting his whole life to meet. He is funny, self-mythologising and genuinely dangerous, and every issue he is in is better than the issues he is not. That the book eventually has to break him — and does something strange and cruel with him rather than something heroic — is the run's one real risk.
Black Squadron works too, in the modest way squadron books work: Snap Wexley, Karé Kun, Jess Pava and L'ulo L'ampar are sketched quickly and consistently, and the reader learns to worry about them. Phil Noto's opening issues are gorgeous — soft, warm, watercolour-adjacent art that makes the Resistance look like people rather than assets. Angel Unzueta takes over for the long middle and does clean, unfussy work that keeps the aircraft legible.
What does not
The MacGuffin. Twenty-five issues are, at bottom, about locating Lor San Tekka, a man whose only narrative function is to hand over a map in the first eight minutes of a film we have all seen. The book is structurally a countdown to somebody else's opening scene, and no amount of good character work disguises that the destination is fixed. The middle stretch — a traitor plot that resolves, restarts and resolves again — is where the padding shows.
The last arc, retelling The Force Awakens from the squadron's point of view, is the clearest statement of the problem: it is competent, it is well drawn, and it exists to fill a gap that did not need filling.
Verdict
Read the first six issues and the Terex material. It is a decent, good-natured, professionally made comic that never once gets to decide its own ending, and it is the strongest available argument that the sequel era was harder to write around than the original trilogy ever was.
