Star Wars: Princess Leia #1 by Mark Waid & Terry Dodson

Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Terry Dodson
Publisher: Marvel
Release Date: March 4, 2015
Star Wars is a flawed film. It’s one of the most beloved movies in the history of movies as well as an indispensible sci-fi/pop cultural touchstone, but lots of it makes zero sense after a close read. For instance, Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin force Princess Leia Organa to watch while they point the Death Star’s superlaser at her home planet of Alderaan and press the “Fire” button. Everything she was before her election to the Imperial Senate is incinerated in an instant. Her whole family (as far as she knew), most of her friends — The Empire kills them all and, I repeat for emphasis, They Make Her Watch.
Very soon after, she points out that Luke Skywalker looks too short to pass for a Stormtrooper and swaps quips with Han Solo. She’s got no tears but plenty of swashbuckles. So we must ask ourselves — “What kind of person goes through such a soul-annihilating episode, only to banter with her new buds unfazed hours later?” An individual equipped with supernaturally thick emotional armor? Or maybe a sociopath?
There have been so, soooooo many Star Wars novels, comics, videogames, erotic fan fics, ect., over the decades that it would be stupid to assume Mark Waid is the first writer to address the profound strangeness of Leia’s seemingly unaffected psychological state during and following the events of the first historical Star Wars film, A New Hope. However, when an onlooking rebel pilot asks, “What’s with the Ice Princess?” after Leia delivers a brief, three-sentence eulogy for Alderaan during the first sequence in Star Wars: Princess Leia #1 (an extension to the final scene of A New Hope) — it works through an understated delivery that prevents it from coming across like a meta commentary.