Chris Warner (1)

Star Wars takes its turn to do the whole "what if?" conceit. If you've read a DC Elseworlds comic or Kim Newman's Anno Dracula books, you'll know the idea. Each of the three stories collected here takes a different one of the films from the original Star Wars trilogy, changes a single event and shows how the story unfolds from there. Usually while exercising the prerogative to have everything go to pot in the most spectacular way possible. What if the Rebels had failed to destroy the Death show more Star? What if Luke had died on Hoth? What if Leia's attempt to rescue Han from Jabba got screwed up?

The three series were originally published separately and I'm not sure reading them together does them any favours. Some of the ideas turn up two or three times: the trip to Dagobah, Leia becoming a Jedi, the Skywalker family revelations.

But you also realise the quality of each story isn't necessarily dependant on to what degree it deviates from the one we know: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are easily the two stronger contributions, but while the former delivers epic spectacle by deviating immensely from the original story, the latter has a lot of fun rewriting Empire as a runabout, with characters turning up at the wrong moments for their bits of the plot. Return of the Jedi never manages spectacle or fun, mirroring the plot of the film while making minor tweaks that ultimately don't feel important.

Writing a what-if story places an onus on the author to not only come up with an alternative series of events, but one that still feels true to the characters and has some tragicomic resonance as a result. Star Wars Omnibus: Infinities probably holds as much interest as a case study in storytelling as it does an exercise in tickling the belly of the fans. show less

Alternate history ranks among the more robust genres in science fiction, as authors frequently explore the consequences of what might have happened had historical events taken a different turn. Far less common, however, are what might be termed alternate stories: other takes on notable fictional works. While both Marvel and DC have explored the possibilities in such storytelling (in their "What If" and "Elseworlds" titles respectively), for the most part it's a form little seen outside of show more comic books. Thus, for Dark Horse Publishing to undertake alternate storytelling of the famous "Original Trilogy" of Star Wars movies marks something of a novelty. In three separate limited-series comics (brought together here in a single omnibus volume) their writers and artists envision what might have happened had events in some of the most famous movies in history had taken a slightly different turn.

The first of these comics builds upon the events of the fourth film, A New Hope. In it, the proton torpedoes Luke Skywalker fires into the exhaust vent only damage rather than destroy the Death Star. With the Rebel base on Yavin-4 destroyed and Princess Leia recaptured by Darth Vader, Luke travels to Dagobah to begin his training with Yoda. This sets up an interesting dynamic, with Vader attempting to turn Leia to the Dark Side while Luke more readily embraces his training to become a Jedi. Yet the ending leaves something to be desired, with the resolution just a little too pat for my tastes.

In the second of these tales, the focus is on the events and the characters featured in The Empire Strikes Back. Here the divergence is a small event with enormous consequences, with Han Solo's tauntaun dying before he can locate Luke in Hoth's frigid wastes. Luke's own subsequent death from exposure because of this sets of a new chain of events, with Han, Leia, and Chewbacca fleeing directly to Bespin before going to Dagobah themselves. This was by far my favorite of the three, both for Dave Land's story (which is inventive while remaining true to the elements of the movie) and for how he develops Leia as a Jedi, which allows him to explore the possibilities of what is by far the most disappointingly unexplored aspect of the entire Star Wars franchise.

It would be hard to top Land's story, and the final comic, which is based on Return of the Jedi, emulates the film in the franchise by falling short of its predecessor's high standard. In this story, the team's failure to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt's fortress forces Luke and Leia to continue their search for his carbonized body. While this alters events somewhat, the story's divergence is considerably less than that of the two previous ones, with the final events for the most part playing out as they did in the movie. Though the ending is interesting, it's something of a letdown after the more creative explorations in the first two series, even if it does end up fitting in with the pattern of the original trilogy of films. show less

In this volume Ghost gets some answers about her life as Elisa Cameron and she finds out she technically isn’t a ghost. A lot of the people who live in Arcadia have psy-powers. Her power is to pass into a world inside herself and then pass from that world into another place which works like teleportation. She was recruited into a secret project run by Doctor Trouvaile. The experiment takes the spirit or astral body from a person and then deposits the spirit of someone from another show more dimension into the empty shell. When the procedure is done on her not only her spirit left, but her body did as well. She went into the in-between world she had created and when she came out she thought she was a ghost with no memory of her life.

A spiritual medium named Concordia comes to Ghost with the complaints of the spirits that are neither dead nor alive and cannot go “into the light” to their final reward. Trouvaile’s project was a way for invaders from another dimension to come into ours. Ghost finds out that the same experiment was done on her sister. She also discovers that the reason she could not remember her life as Elisa Cameron was because of memory blocks put in by Focus, the person who was supposed to be helping her find out about her past. This is quite a blow to Ghost since she thought she could trust this woman.

This looks like the end of the Ghost Omnibus Series. There are two cross-over comics; Ghost/Hellboy and Ghost/Batgirl. Dark Horse has brought back the heroine in a tamer series set in Chicago where she is fighting extra-dimensional demons.

I liked how the writer brought in all of the wild stories from the different comics and organized them into a plausible explanation. The author took characters from as far back as the beginning of the series and kept the continuity while establishing a new plotline. Too bad we won’t find out if Ghost can get her sister Margo back into her body or what happens to Silhouette, the immigrant spirit from a world that exists along side ours. show less

These four issues wer a fun and different look at the Star Wars Universe. It took a simple idea. What would happen if Luke 'missed' or something else went wrong so that the Death Star didn't blow up? And then it goes from there.

It was interesting to see what the author chose to change and what to keep the same. I liked what they did with the Yoda part and I was very surprised that I liked the Leia story too.

I will say that I didn't love how fast it all came together at the end, but, other show more than that it was a fun read. show less