Meet the Hutt Who Helped Luke Skywalker Learn About the Jedi

At the end of the original Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker had a lightsaber and not much else. The old man who started to mentor him died at the hands of the Empire’s most feared enforcer and he didn’t know anything about the legacy he was supposed to continue. This week’s Star Wars comic shows that Luke got his next lessons about the Jedi in a really unlikely place.

Marvel Comics’ Star Wars series has partially been about how Luke Skywalker grows into the role of a Force-wielder. He hunts for clues that can help him tap the innate abilities that Ben Kenobi said he had. He ran into Boba Fett along the way. In Star Wars #8 last month, Luke’s quest took him to the smuggler’s moon Nar Shadaa, where his lightsaber was stolen. In this week’s Star Wars #9, he gets it back but is abducted by Grakkus the Hutt, an underworld kingpin who’s got one hell of a Jedi fetish.

I like this idea a lot, because it accentuates how time-lost and mysterious the Jedi must have seemed in the era after they got slaughtered in the prequel trilogy. Collecting Jedi memorabilia would be like hunting down gear and uniforms from, say, World War II. These things would have historical importance and, in the case of items that once belonged to the Sith, a whiff of the taboo. There’s a slightly similar beat in Lando #4, where the least trustworthy man in the galaxy has led a heist to steal the Emperor’s yacht, which is packed with ancient Sith artifacts.

Lando doesn’t care anything about that Force hogwash; he’s just trying to pay his way out of a gambling debt. But the whole reason Grakkus kidnapped the Rebel Alliance’s most important pilot is because he needs help unlocking a Jedi holocron. Problem is, Luke’s never done this before. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to work…

…until, of course, it does.

This plot theme—where readers watch Luke learn about what is, essentially, his spiritual legacy—is particularly interesting because this December’s Force Awakens movie might show him walking John Boyega’s Finn character along the same path. It’s cool seeing that Anakin Skywalker’s spawn had many teachers on the way to Return of the Jedi’s fateful father/son showdown. And it’s a clever twist that one of them was inadvertently a Hutt.

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