Review: ‘Sana Starros’ #1 – ‘Family Matters’ Sees Sana Return Home to Family Troubles
Sana Starros has been involved in so many comic arcs in both the main Star Wars run and the Doctor Aphra series, that it’s about time she got a comic run all of her own. The first issue, Family Matters, does a good job of introducing us to a part of Sana’s life completely unconnected from the likes of Aphra and Han Solo while efficiently setting up the series’ premise.
We meet a few members of the Starros clan here, and we get a good idea of their personalities: the protective matriarch “Grammy” Thea, the popular and beautiful cousin Aryssha, and her distrusting and secretive mother Mevera. Of course, these characters aren’t hugely fleshed out right now, but it’s a lot of characters to introduce in a single opening issue that has a lot of work to do in setting up the main story, so that’s understandable.
The story doesn’t waste too much time getting into the action, so the pacing is great, and it’s very entertaining. It also seems to be set before Hidden Empire and the current Doctor Aphra arc, as Sana Starros appears to be reeling from a bad break up with Aphra. They first dated when they attended the University of Bar’leth together, so this might be set before A New Hope.
This was a solid debut issue, and I look forward to reading more.
Spoilers ahead…
So it appears Sana Starros is embarking on a heist with her grandmother, aunt, and cousin to recover a family heirloom from the Empire! It’s certainly an interesting prospect; the idea for this run seems inspired by the Starros family’s High Republic ancestry, as one Ghirra Starros was a Republic senator for Hosnian Prime in the High Republic novels.
We only got a tiny peek at Hosnian Prime in this issue, though it’s good to know it isn’t just another city planet like Coruscant, as it still has oceans. Sana returns to her ancestral home after a disappointing job to lie low after her break up with Aphra, and we see that it could do with a bit of TLC. The walls are covered with vines, and the whole place looks dirty and abandoned.
Sana’s grandmother Thea has rigged up a droid security force built from cobbled together parts — we can see the heads of battle droids and medical droids on different bodies, and the head of a pit droid on top of an astromech droid — it’s interesting to see how far the Starros family’s star has fallen since the days of the High Republic, going from senators to scroungers. That’s a family history I would very much like to learn more about.
We learn a bit more about Sana’s immediate family too, though they don’t really appear in this issue. She has a brother named Phel whom she’s not on speaking terms with; Sana feels he has done something unforgiveable. It sounds like he might have joined the Empire — the comparisons to Aryssha’s Imperial officer husband and Phel’s mention of the Jedi as “traitors” in a flashback panel suggest this — while we also learn that Sana has two fathers. It seems her biological father met his current partner after her mother died.
Her aunt Mevera seems to dislike her, perhaps resenting her for forging her own path and not staying with the family. As a result, she’s distrustful and unwilling to share family secrets with her. I wonder if she feels Sana abandoned the family by going out on her own, and therefore feels that family matters aren’t her business anymore.
The main conflict of this issue is revealed when we learn that Aryssha married an Imperial officer and is pregnant with his twin babies. She claims he’s a broken man whom she once thought capable of change, though I saw no evidence of that as he stormed their home and abducted her. He seems very one-note so far, a standard Imperial officer full of his own self-importance, but that could change in future issues.
However, it seems this was all part of the plan. Thea and Mevera reveal that they intended to have him take Aryssha so that they could enact their plans to recover a family relic, and the cousin is in on it. I do love a Star Wars heist story, so this should be a very entertaining run. This was a solid first issue, with a strong base to build upon.
Rating: 7/10
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
