Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Darth Vader (Vol. 1), Issue #8 – “Book II: Shadows and Secrets (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, Darth Vader returns to Tatooine to find nothing of importance with respect to Luke’s whereabouts and/or finding him and/or anything to do with his dietary habits. He and Doctor Aphra shove off to a planet called Son-tuul where they kill an entire clan and steal millions of monies from their vault. The Empire has become just a tad richer!…

…except Doctor Aphra returns to Son-tuul to a seedy bar full of bounty hunters and lets them know, hey, the Imperials have stolen a bunch of money from the Son-tuul Pride and she knows exactly where it’s going and how to stop them and how to get the money and how to get away. “Who wants to be rich?” she says, smiling.

SNAKE IN THE GRASS, THIS LADY! I think I’m in love!

Darth Vader (Vol. 1), Issue #8 [October, 2015]
Written by: Kieron Gillen
“Book II: Shadows and Secrets (Part 2)”

I like Aphra’s tattoo. Reminds me of Juliette’s tattoos from Silo, which I recommend whole-heartedly.

On Anthean Prime, at the edge of the Outer Rim, Aphra flies her craft toward what appears to be a moonlike satellite orbiting the planet. She not only flies toward it, but she blows the fucker up with the push of a button, breaking it up into thousands of pieces. This causes the nearby Imperial ship (with the stash) to get bombarded with debris, shorting out their defense systems and radar and sonar and elephant detection equipment and their vending machine.

“For the next five minutes, the Imperials will think their systems being down is a side effect of the collisions,” Aphra says, which is exactly what I thought for five minutes as well, but now the egg is surely on my face. “Let’s go to work.”

The crew on Aphra’s craft gears up and boards the Imperial ship. They open a giant stupid manhole cover and drop themselves in. Looking for the vault, they arrange for the crew’s quarters to be locked up. “Make sure it looks like a localized malfunction,” Aphra says, knowing her way around making anything look like a localized malfunction, including Janet Jackson’s clothes.

Yeah, well, salt beats slug. Checkmate.

They find the vault and prepare themselves for a slew of mechanized security droids to come in the room and salt their slugs, so to speak. Aphra’s ready, though. She’s smiling! She rolls a flash bomb into the room, which goes off and shorts out all the droids’ circuitry. NOW! MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE! The bounty hunters enter the room and start blasting the droids further with the blaster guns. Salting their slugs, as it were.

They only have a few more minutes to wrench that vault door open before the Imperial crew gets the door open and finds them and peppers their snails. The bounty hunter called Bossk ain’t afraid! But Aphra kindly lets him know that they’ll have to blow the whole ship up to cover their tracks if they get to that point, so let’s not let anybody see us, m’kay?

So this is what happens next: the door does not get wrenched open, but rather the Wookiee Krrsantan, who is driving Aphra’s craft, if it even belongs to her in the first place, blows up another big chunk of asteroid which bangs into the Imperial ship, splits open the hull, and causes millions of these so-called “credit ingots” to spill out into the sky. This was apparently on purpose. Sounds risky! Let’s keep reading.

OK, so this is what happens: BT-1 (the evil R2-D2) is able to generate a strong magnetic field in order to SCOOP UP THE LOOT.

They don’t get all of it though. They don’t even get most of it. All they get are two big boxes worth.

You done fucked up, Aphra.

Look on the bright side! The Empire got hosed here any way you slice it. And they don’t even know whodunit. Divvy it all up, friends! And they do, but the bounty hunter warns Aphra that they had better not find out they were double-crossed in any way or else they’ll stuff her head up her butt and then shoot her in the headbutt.

“You know I’ve got a fairly lax attitude about property rights,” she says, “but do you think I’d cross four of the deadliest bounty hunters in the galaxy?”

“I think you’d think about it,” says the one named Bossk. “Then ssslink away.”

Ha! Funny funny! Oh you men, you! Let’s try this again soon; Darth Vader’s got another job coming up. Hee hee hee. Tee hee.

On a nearby moon of Anthan Prime, it is revealed that Aphra helped Krrsantan suck up an enormous amount of credit ingots into a satellite. She promises five times his score to “help him with his problem”, which I’m guessing even Preparation H can’t fix. But, hey, double-crossing three bounty hunters appeared to be the way to go! No deathwish from this lady, that’s for damn sure.

Vader approaches from the depths of the moon. “I promised the Wookiee help finding the people responsible for cutting him up,” Aphra tells him, which is also news to me. “Any chance of helping me out?”

Darth Vader does his trademark intimidating “wearing a helmet” face. “We will see,” he says.

A man of few words, this guy.

He was behind this all along as well! Now they have a droid factory, a gaggle of bounty hunters, and money to pay them! Next, Vader needs some information on Luke Skywalker. That asshole Luke Skywalker. Grrrr, that guy really burns his pot roast.

Ugh, let’s table that Luke Skywalker asshat for now. First, a special mission for Aphra, and she gets exactly one month to carry it out. “If you do not contact me within a month, I will contact you,” Vader tells her, walking away. “That is not something you would enjoy.”

Ooooooh, the big scary man strikes again! When Vader walks away, O-O-O the protocol droid finds it quite interesting that he himself didn’t receive a cut! Aphra tells him that his joy in his work is a cut enough! LOL!

Meantime, things are blowing up on Mygeeto, Son-tuul, and Anthan 14. Death and destruction and the ripping up of Pokémon cards. Darth Vader gets briefed on something called “the Plasma Devils”, a criminal organization that is still “defiantly active”. “To crush them is our main remaining task before we can move on…”

Grand General Sideburns motions to the Astarte twins, Morit and Aiolin, who were introduced in Issue #5 and probably have sex with each other. They will be in charge of crushing the plasma devils. Or maybe I should be capitalizing that. THE PLASMA DEVILS. That’s better!

Some Admiral Ackbar-looking punk named Karbin contests this decision. The twins are soft and squishy, it should be a strong, tough lobster who crushes THE PLASMA DEVILS. Grand General Sideburns is like “no” and has something special planned for Karbin! *pushes him into a giant food processor*

Barring that, find the one who destroyed the Death Star and capture/kill him! Easy peasy lemon sq–

“NO,” says Adolph “Adolph Hitler” Vader. “The task is mine. My grudge with this rebel is personal. I will hunt the pilot down and deliver him to the Emperor personally.”

The lady called Tulon who looks all modified like the Borg tells Vader that this isn’t a mission to salve the wounds of his failure! Oh snap! Let someone more qualified take the task! Like her!

Tagge “Sideburns” Magoo tells Tulon AND Vader that they both are too emotionally invested and would be terrible fucking choices. Abysmal. Worse than poop.

You are both crybabies and I’m going to throw both of you down a well if you don’t behave.

Tagge has research-related missions for Tulon. As for Vader, find it who stole all those credit ingots from the Son-tuul Pride and punish them severely for their crimes against… uh… credit ingots.

Vader puts his head down all mopey like. “As you wish, Grand General.” I’m wondering how he’s going to get himself out of this immense dill pickle. Claussen, of course. Not Vlasic. Vlasic fucking sucks.

“And that brings the meeting to a close. You have your tasks. You’re dismissed. I await your successful reports with interest.” Tagge goes back to his own task of randomly touching areas of holographic images.

Oh, and by the way, Vader. There’s a new guy here that’s going to keep an eye on you. I know the old one was some sort of mole, but I swear this new guy is better. He’s also Black, so you can’t do anything to him without it being racist. His name is Inspector Thanoth. “As the Emperor wishes,” Vader says with an air of despondency to his breathy, sexy voice.

And quite an inspector he is! When Thanoth and Vader are alone, Thanoth is perceptive enough to observe that Vader is covered in the exact kind of moon dust from Anthan 14? Coincidence? I think not, good sir! Enjoy your Claussen pickle!

“Lord Vader,” Thanoth looks sheepishly. “I’m not a sycophant, traitor, or – worst of all – an incompetent like Oon-Ai. I’m a professional investigator. And this? A simple case. Larceny is the least of the great crimes. Mark my words, we’ll have tidied this away in days.”

Vader is like hurf de durf we shall see, idiot.

Final Thoughts

Vader is trying to get away with something here and he’s not very slick. It’s kind of funny to see this horrible dude try to maintain his stoic tough guy demeanor while he keeps getting undermined by a nerd like Palpatine. Anakin Skywalker has always been dumb.