Star Wars' Newest Villains Are Getting Their Own Origin Comic
Star Wars' newest villains, the Nihil, are getting their own origin comic. With the Skywalker saga complete on the big screen, Lucasfilm Publishing is once again blazing the trail for the franchise. They've launched Star Wars: The High Republic, a transmedia initiative that's set some 200 years before the events of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
This is a time when the Jedi and the Republic were at their height, with the Republic taking advantage of developing hyperspace technology to advance into the Outer Rim. Chancellor Soh has a grand vision of uniting the galaxy, but she has not reckoned on the strength of the opposition she will receive. The greatest villains of the High Republic Era are a warlike band of pirates called the Nihil, who possess hyperspace technology beyond that of the Jedi or Republic and have wreaked havoc across the Outer Rim. They were responsible for a hyperspace disaster that almost destroyed an entire solar system in Charles Soule's Light of the Jedi, and in Cavan Scott's Rising Storm they came close to killing the Chancellor herself. They're led by a mysterious figure called Marchion Ro - whose secrets are soon to be revealed.
Speaking at the Star Wars: The High Republic panel at ComicCon@Home 2021, writer Charles Soule confirmed he is currently working on a two-issue miniseries for Marvel Comics that will tell the complicated backstory of Marchion Ro. Called The Eye of the Storm, after Marchion Ro's title among the Nihil, these oversized issues will be released in January and February 2022.
To date, Marchion Ro has been a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, in large part because his entire personality is a mask; not even his closest allies among the Nihil truly know him, and - as proven in Cavan Scott's Rising Storm - he is quite capable of making someone believe he is their best friend before engineering their death without a shred of remorse. He has somehow kidnapped a Force-sensitive member of the San Tekka clan of hyperspace prospectors, and he has used her abilities to chart the Paths the Nihil use to travel through hyperspace; this connects him subtly to the main Star Wars saga, where - centuries later - one of the San Tekka clan's descendants gifted a hyperspace map to the Resistance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Charles Soule is one of Marvel's best writers of Star Wars: The High Republic. He's demonstrated tremendous skill writing villain comics in the past, helming a popular Darth Vader run and revealing how Ben Solo fell to the dark side in The Rise of Kylo Ren. He really is the perfect choice to write a miniseries revealing the secrets of Star Wars' newest villain.
Source: Comic-Con