In Star Wars #17, Darth Vader had an opportunity to showcase that his power was far superior to Luke’s with a callback to The Empire Strikes Back.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers from Star Wars #17, on sale now from Marvel Comics.
The first time that Darth Vader went toe-to-toe with Luke Skywalker was on Could City above Bespin. Although Luke impressed his father, it wasn’t a real contest. Vader toyed with Luke and tried to freeze him in carbonite, rather than trying to kill him outright. If Vader had brought the full might of the dark side to bear against the inexperienced Jedi, the fight wouldn’t have even been a contest.
But in Star Wars #17, by Charles Soule, Ramon Rosanas, Rachelle Rosenberg and VC’s Clayton Cowles, Vader got a chance to prove his might to his son. In an Empire Strikes Back callback. Vader accomplished a feat that Luke had attempted and failed on Dagobah by lifting his crashed ship out of rough terrain with nothing but the power of the Force.
The Star Wars: War of the Bounty Hunters comic crossover event is set shortly after the Cloud City duel and is centered around the pursuit of Han Solo’s carbonite-encased body. The Crimson Dawn wound up with Solo and put him up for auction. Vader, however, disregarded the auction and took Solo for himself so that he could use the smuggler as bait to catch his son. Luke didn’t want to face Vader in person yet, so he taunted Vader to come get him. That set the Dark Lord on a path to pursue this true target in his TIE Advanced Fighter.
What commenced was a game of cat and mouse over the planet of Jekara. Vader snuck up on Luke by going underwater and coming up underneath him. Faced with Vader’s superior piloting and command of the Force, Luke had to do something tricky. He flew close to the water’s surface and uses his ship’s engines to make a massive wave. The cold temperatures took over from there, causing the wave to almost immediately freeze and catch Vader’s fighter under its weight as it came crashing down.
Declining to kill Vader with his X-wing’s laser canons, Luke flew off to help get Han back. He thought that Vader was out of commission, and what happened to him on Dagobah was likely in the back of his mind. His fighter was submerged in the swamps beside Yoda’s hut, and he couldn’t lift it. In the same way, Vader’s TIE was trapped in the Jekara’s ice, so he thought that freeing the fighter would be more than Vader could handle. However, Luke didn’t factor in that his adversary was a Sith Lord who commanded an advanced knowledge of the Force.
The armor-clad dark lord easily raised his fighter out of the ice and continued pursuing his son. The scene was a cool callback to The Empire Strikes Back, and it also demonstrated that Vader’s power was much more advanced than Luke’s at this point in the story. It also goes to show how much Luke’s power grows by Return of the Jedi.
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