Comic Book / Clone Wars Adventures

aka: Star Wars Clone Wars Adventures

Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures is a Star Wars Legends comic series with art modeled after Star Wars: Clone Wars. The series consists of ten paperback novellas published between 2004 and 2007, each containing either three or four standalone stories. The series features both returning and original characters and covers a wide emotional spectrum of genres (more than one Cosmic Horror Story, Jedi on spy missions, slapstick Armed Farces tales, War Is Hell stories, etc.).

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This work contains example of:

• All of the Other Reindeer: In "One of a Kind", it's shown that the Zeltron bounty hunter Vianna D'Pow experienced extensive and malicious discrimination in her youth due to being the only albino member of her normally vividly red-skinned species.
• Anachronic Order: Multiple novellas contain stories taking place during or after Order 66 even as other stories in the book take place earlier in the Clone Wars.
• Artistic License – Biology: The Zeltron bounty hunter Vianna D'Pow is described as being albino, and her skin is an appropriate bone-white for this — but her hair and eyes are both coal-black, whereas in a true albino they would also be colorless.
• Badass Normal: Even if the hero of the day lacks Force powers, if they're the title character, they may just pull off a grandiose feat of their own, if not through strength or firepower then sheer ingenuity. One of the biggest examples is Bail Organa, the non-combatant senator from Alderaan, masterminding a breakout of the captive Jedi Shaak Ti from CIS imprisonment.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: "Heroes on Both Sides" ends with both the last surviving clone commander and last surviving Viidaav warrior aiming their blasters at each other with a bomb about to go off. They both open fire. The next page shows the clone trooper alive, revealing that while he killed the Viidaav, the Viidaav in turn wasn't aiming for the clone at all, but the bomb control device behind him.
• Bank Robbery: "The Precious Shining" features a trio of war refugees who attempt to rob a Separatist bank vault while disguised in clone armor.
• Bantering Baddie Buddies: "Thunder Road" features two Separatist mercenaries who seem more interested in whimsically speculating about how the canyon got its name than trying to capture Anakin and Obi-Wan. Their boss repeatedly tells them to shut up.
• Bloodier and Gorier: While the series had some high impact violence of its own, the comic was a lot more liberal with depicting not just blood flowing from certain wounds, but vast numbers of brutal, on-page deaths to boot.
• Bolivian Army Ending: "The Order of Outcasts" ends with Padawan Joc Sah and his new allies charging a large division of clone troopers after the execution of Order 66. We never see if any of them made it out.
• Book Ends: A Stranger In Town begins with Yoda carrying a gigantic box into town, which contains a turret gun used to fight off a Separatist invasion force. It ends with Yoda leaving town carrying that same box, his duty done.
• Call-Forward:
  • During "Blind Force", Obi-Wan decides that, since being able to see hasn't helped them fight off the Nivek Shadowmen, he and Anakin will just have to don makeshift blindfolds, let go their conscious selves and act on instinct. This would be the same lesson he'd teach Anakin's son Luke in the future.
  • In "Spy Girls", Padme's hairstyle happens to be the side buns made famous by her daughter Leia.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Mace Windu and Saesee Tiin spend a lot of "Heavy Metal Jedi" debating the sufficiency of Windu's precision against Tiin's raw power and vice versa... while in the midst of fighting off the droid invasion on Iktotch.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Released before Revenge of the Sith and being based off of the 2003 micro-series, the comic depicts General Grievous as he was in the series: a lethally effective Jedi killer, a deadly serious trophy collector capable of defeating Asajj Ventress and Durge with ease and the exact opposite of a joke compared to how he'd infamously be known in later works.
  • Barriss Offee is as loyal to the Jedi Order as she was in the original series compared to the path she ultimately took in the other Clone Wars show.
  • Plo Koon seems to only communicate in his native language in "One Battle", as opposed to other works having him speak Basic with no issue (including a later story in the same series, Means & Ends, where he teams up with Kit Fisto). He's able to get his point across with body language instead.
  • In his one appearance in this comic, Quinlan Vos is basically his Legends self, a serious and focused Jedi Knight, quite a ways away from his canon near-goofball self seen in the later The Clone Wars series.
• Construction Vehicle Rampage: In the story "Graduation Day", droids attack a farm operated by failed candidates for Jedi Knighthood, one of whom plows through them with a farming machine.
• Continuity Nod:
  • A number of stories feature the Commando clone troopers made famous by Republic Commando.
  • "The Brink" features Serra Keto, last seen in the Revenge of the Sith video game adaptation. Just like in the game, she's rather mouthy and dual wields lightsabers with aplomb.
• Damned by Faint Praise: In "Appetite for Adventure", Obi-Wan once claimed a plate of Dractuvian Cave Slugs to be the best thing he ate on Dractuv, only to then readily declare them disgusting the next time he has such a plate. Apparently every dish from Dractu is plain horrible, and the Cave Slugs are merely the least awful of these.
• A Day in the Limelight: Quite a number of stories focus on a variety of side characters, not just Obi-Wan or Anakin. This can include secondary Jedi masters like Quinlan Vos or Plo Koon, non-Jedi heroes like the Commando clones or Padme, or full on non-combatants such as Bail Organa or even Dexter Jettster.
• Decoy Convoy: In "The Chain of Command," a recently knighted Jedi is sent on a courier mission that is really meant to distract the Separatists while Ki-Adi-Mundi and Aayla Secura carry out another mission. Only, it turns out that they themselves are being manipulated into carrying out a pointless task to distract them from interfering in one of Palpatine's schemes.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: One of the few times Plo Koon appears before the other Clone Wars series is in "One Battle", which shows him only speaking (or only capable of speaking) his native Kel Dor language. The lead clone in charge seems to have trouble understanding him at first. Later works, including the next issue of Clone Wars Adventures that he appears in, have him speaking plain Basic just fine.
• Enemy Mine: In "Order of the Outcasts", the Jedi Padawan Joc Sah is attacked by a group of rugged individualists who don't want either the Republic or the Separatists on their (strategically important) planet. The settler militia goes from trying to kill Joc to saving his life when Palpatine issues Order 66. They then join forces to fight off the next waves of arriving clones.
• Foreign Queasine: Dractuvian Cave Slugs, as Obi-Wan states in "Appetite for Adventure". As he states to poor Dex (who put himeslf through hell getting those slugs) the only reason Obi claimed them to be the best thing he ate on Dractu was because the food there overall was disgusting.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In "To the Vanishing Point", a wounded Jedi uses telekinesis to keep a damaged Star Destroyer from crashing into a battlefield as her allies evacuate. However, she is forced to stay behind and is crushed once she can no longer hold back the starship.
• Hidden in Plain Sight:
  • Done in a chapter fittingly titled "Hide In Plain Sight", and promptly foiled by Luminara in said chapter. After warning the refugees fleeing Nadiem that they'll have to leave all items or pets that will take up too much space on the transports, she notices one seemingly overweight refugee. She proceeds to slice his poncho open, revealing he's of perfectly normal weight, trying to smuggle dozens of luxuries onboard that would take up valuable room. The conversation between Luminara and Barriss Offee afterward discusses the flaw in such a plan.
    Barriss: How did you know he was hiding something?
    Luminara: Because he was the only person in line not carrying something. Sometimes trying too hard to escape detection will draw attention to one's self. Besides, for a man of his apparent girth, he had awfully skinny legs!
  • Barriss herself later pulls off a more successful variant of this trope in the same story, carying out an ambush and playing dead after the initial droid attack goes through, allowing her and her clone contingent to strike them from behind.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: "One Battle" has the clone commander present being the only one who can understand Plo Koon's Kel Dor speech, although it's presented at first as if he can't understand the Jedi Master at all.
• Meaningful Echo: Sarge, the lead Commando clone in "Orders", frequently tells Evan "These are our orders." The first time, it's when his squad has to convince Evan to leave his home to flee to a refugee camp, despite Evan now having nothing there. The second time it's in regard to their mission to save the women and children caught up in the war, and is presented as a gentle, heartwarming moment. The final time Sarge states this... is just as Order 66 comes down and they've gunned down their Jedi general right before Evan's eyes.
• Men of Sherwood: The local settler militia in "The Order of the Outcasts" start out as antagonists but quickly form an Enemy Mine alliance with Joc Sah during Order 66 and prove just as capable of killing clone troopers as Joc does.
• The Mob Boss Is Scarier: In "Life Below", the leader of a Separatist spy ring commits suicide rather than surrender to Quinlan Vos and risk the wrath of Darth Sidious.
• The Quiet One:
  • Yoda goes through all of "A Stranger In Town" without speaking a single word to the villagers, or to the Separatist army leader. However, they of course have a lot to say about him.
  • While she's capable of speaking as shown in later works, Bultar Swan goes through the entirety of "Impregnable" not uttering a single word. The bulk of its dialogue instead goes to its villain.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: We all know Yoda can lift a starfighter out of a murky swamp with the Force, sure. "Stranger In Town" decides to match that with showing Yoda physically carrying a box twenty times his size. It happens to contain a massive turret gun that he uses to rout an entire Separatist invasion force.
• Poor Communication Kills: In "Heroes on Both Sides," Grievous and Dooku decide to sacrifice a Separatist planet by luring a Republic army to the area and then detonating explosives to wipe out both sides. A clone army and the local militia wipe themselves out fighting to reach Dooku's explosive device. It isn't until he's the last man standing that the clone commander realizes that both sides were trying to disarm the bomb, and all that bloodshed was for nothing.
• Run or Die: When Anakin Skywalker is summoned to a space station in "The Brink," he finds the corpses of a fellow Jedi and several clones. The Sole Survivor who summoned him (another Jedi) says that the only rational strategy is to leave immediately and blow up the station behind them. Anakin is unwilling to consider this strategy until his first run-in with the Blob Monster that killed everyone.
  Anakin: Do these things have any weaknesses?
  Serra Keto: If I knew that, I wouldn't have sent that distress call, now would I?
• Saved by Canon: Most of the Jedi protagonists featured in the story will survive at least until Order 66.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: "The Package" follows eight Commando-class clone troopers being ambushed while delivering a diplomatic package to Palpatine, with seven of them dying to protect the package. The final page reveals that the package contains a simple trinket, and a disinterested Palpatine has it tucked away in a closet with other unwanted gifts.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: "Salvaged" has a clone pilot decide not to help execute Order 66 and lie to some other clones that a ship is devoid of Jedi passengers, both because said Jedi are children and because the ship's pilot saved his life.
• Side Bet: Part of the plot of "Versus" is a mysterious (and seemingly very lucky) coliseum-goer betting great amounts of money on Luminara winning three matches in a row without Force powers, which happens to be a part of a deal Luminara worked out with Mondo-Mod the Hutt, that chapter's antagonist. Said coliseum-goer lucks out each and every single time owing to Luminara's combat skills. The very end of the chapter reveals this mysterious masked winner to be Barriss, gleefully betting on her master knowing full well Luminara would win. While more of a sideplot to the main one, Barriss' successful bets lead to Mondo-Mod going utterly bankrupt from the losses.
• Sole Survivor: "The Package" ends with all but one of the Commando team dead trying to receive the eponymous package. Not that it matters when it's a small trinket that Chancellor Palpatine barely cares about.
• Spanner in the Works: "Waiting" has an elite clone trooper planning to blow up a bridge as a droid army crosses over it, only for some local scavengers to steal his weapons, forcing him to chase after them to retrieve the explosives and carry out his mission on time.
• Trojan Prisoner: "Bailed Out" is about Bail Organa, seemingly about to ally Alderaan with the Confederacy, inspecting Wat Tambor's Techno Union facilities on Metalorn. His real goal is to break a captive Shaak Ti out of imprisonment, achieved by smuggling in her lightsaber in a small box and claiming it contains the official Alderaan seal. She very quickly breaks herself out once her saber's in Force reach and makes it off planet with Bail and his retinue in tow.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • One chapter sees Asajj Ventress and Durge trying (and completely failing) to defeat Generl Grievous, without a single light side character showing up.
  • "Old Scores" focuses on the bounty hunter Aurra Sing escaping from and killing a Hutt who tries to lure her into a bounty hunt with her as the target.
• Wham Line: "Orders" sees a contingent of Commando troopers rescue a kid named Evan who lost his parents. While they do sternly say they have their orders even if they don't like them, they still try to befriend him, even removing their helmets and detailing their cloning history to him. Eventually they get Evan to General Traavis, a nearby Jedi Master... who says this line, cluing the reader into exactly when this story takes place and what is going to happen on the very next page.
  Traavis: I've received some good news: General Grievous is dead. This war will soon be ended.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Several stories develop the B-1 Battle Droids sympathetically. One of them tries to run away from the war after being damaged, several reprogrammed droids work as crew members on a salvage ship that gives a lift to Jedi children, and another is carried around by Aayla Secura on a mission (while getting some good snarky dialogue) for information after she cuts off his arms and legs.
• Whole Episode Flashback: "Skywalkers" is one such episode. The Framing Device is the setting of Tatooine some nineteen years after the Clone Wars, with old Ben Kenobi relating a story of Anakin Skywalker to his curious young son Luke, about how the two Jedi took down a Separatist air force in the skies of Terra Sool. After Anakin's successfully completed the mission, the very next, and thus last, page is of Darth Vader in silent contemplation, having just slain Ben in battle aboard the Death Star.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "A Stranger in Town" is based on the movie Django. In both stories, the protagonist arrives in an isolated settlement with a large and mysterious box that turns out to contain a BFG, and then uses that weapon against an army of invaders.
• The Worm That Walks: Kit Fisto comes across one such organism in "Fierce Currents". The Moappa seem like harmless little critters living on the Mon Calamari seabed at first, but can combine into a being capable of matching wits with a Jedi master. The best Fisto can do is disperse them with the Force for a few hours, while advising the Calamari to start getting along with both the Quarren and the Moappa.

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