Marvel’s New Acolyte Comic Gives a Sorrowful Twist to Its Story

The Acolyte won’t be making a return to our screens, but its world is preparing to live on in a plethora of new comics and books—starting off with this week’s release of Star Wars: Kelnacca, a new one-shot comic from Marvel about the life of the show’s mysterious wookiee Jedi. It’s a simple, quiet tale, but one that adds a further twinge of regret to the show’s untimely end… as well as Kelnacca’s.

Just as he was in The Acolyte itself, Kelnacca is a taciturn, secondary figure even in his own comic—written by High Republic stalwart Cavan Scott, and with art by Marika Cresta, Ariana Maher, and Jim Campbell. Rather us getting to see his interiority or even approach him as a singular figure in the spotlight, much of the one-shot is framed through the storytelling instead of another Jedi, Yarzion Vell. First as an aged Jedi Master on his deathbed, and then through flashbacks to his time as a young Padawan during the events of the High Republic novel and comics series, Kelnacca tells a story about the Jedi and their approach to loss, and most crucially how they move on from it.

© Marika Cresta, Ariana Maher, and Jim Campbell/Marvel Comics

When we first chronologically encounter Vell, it’s in the wake of the destruction of Starlight Beacon, a calamity that saw his master killed in the aftermath. Just as quickly as he is left to try and grieve the loss of his master, Kelnacca swoops in without a word and picks things up where they left off: the cold duty of a Jedi is to compartmentalize these attachments even as they are formed, one connection breaking in the moment only for a new one to be forged the next. It’s an interesting choice, one that still frames Kelnacca much as he was in the show: there’s a distance, a lack of understanding to what we know of who this character really is. We’re left to infer things in the silence, and in Vell’s perspective both recounting this story to his own Padawan near the end of his life, and when he was a young boy likewise dealing with the loss of a mentor figure.

That might be frustrating to the kind of reader who, perhaps, might have preferred to see Kelnacca’s backstory laid out and categorized more explicitly, but even the one real “fact” we get about him in this story is less about a singular piece of information to his character, though it does tie this story of attachment and grief back to Kelnacca’s untimely end in The Acolyte. During Vell’s recollections, we learn that he once explained the tattooed markings on his head as a reflection of cultural practices from his species; a sign of respect to a great mentor figure is to ink their name in runic script on your head to represent their part in your own story. Just as Vell did it once for his first master—and she in turn did it for him—it’s revealed during the climax of the story, as Kelnacca comes to visit Vell just as he passes on into the Force, that the shaved head and tattoos we see on him in The Acolyte are in fact him honoring that same practice for Vell.

© Marika Cresta, Ariana Maher, and Jim Campbell/Marvel Comics

It’s an interesting revelation for two reasons, not just for its understanding of Jedi attachment—that it is not this cut and dry thing—but for also how it plays into Kelnacca’s eventual end. Throughout the one-shot Kelnacca is presented as someone who knows when to come in and be there when necessary: the way he swoops into Vell’s life, the way he eventually knights him and lets him go as a Padawan, the way he returns to see him one last time, even the way he carries on that cycle just as effortlessly by picking up Vell’s own Padawan as his next student. It’s the reflection of the Jedi’s own spiritual apex at the time of the High Republic, this idea that they are open-minded about this idea of attachment, but it’s also one that mirrors the decline we see in them by the time of The Acolyte.

Traumatized by his part in the events on Brendok, Kelnacca’s only choice by the contemporary timeframe of the show is to be isolated and abandoned by the Jedi, largely left to himself by choice and by the Order’s own reticence to reach out (in part, because they never knew the full picture thanks to Indara and Sol’s lies, just another layer of institutional rot). And so, when Kelnacca is killed by the Stranger on Khofar, he’s left to die alone, unreflected on. There is no one to carry Kelnacca’s story with them, save for Sol, who takes it to his own death soon enough. The Order’s recalcitrance means that no one was there to support him, and only arrived when it was too late and the situation needed to be turned into a clean-up. It’s a fascinating little kick to the gut, and an interesting way to reframe and reinforce the The Acolyte‘s larger story about the Jedi in the process.

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