“Mara Jade: By the Emperor’s Hand” (1998-99) marked Timothy Zahn’s first foray into comics, but he apparently got good guidance from friend and collaborator Michael A. Stackpole. In this six-issue series, Zahn wrote the overall story, Stackpole wrote the scripts for issues 1-3, and Zahn wrote the scripts for 4-6. It reads very much like a meaty novella (the duo had collaborated on “Side Trip” before this and would go on to do “Interlude at Darkknell”), yet it also leaves room for Carlos Ezquerra’s art to shine.
You won’t get the complete Mara Jade backstory here, but it is an essential Jade tale. If you’re like me, you came away from Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy and “Hand of Thrawn” duology liking Mara, but your reason for liking her was shallow: Luke saw something in her, and since he’s the hero of the story, we trusted him. Also, she’s a lithe, superpowered woman with flowing red hair. All male readers wanted to turn her away from the dark side, just like Luke. But if we take a step back from those facts, it must be noted that Mara was an Emperor’s Hand; she did the bidding of the most evil man in the galaxy. This includes, we must presume, killing lots of good, liberty-loving people — from Jedis to Rebels to businessbeings — who ended up in Palpatine’s crosshairs.
“Mara Jade: By the Emperor’s Hand” allows us to like Mara without feeling guilty about it. In order to make this happen, Zahn and Stackpole cheat a bit: Her target in the opening issues is not good guys, but rather Black Sun offshoot Black Nebula. Basically, the authors make Mara’s targets more evil than Mara herself, so she becomes the good guy by comparison.
Each issue plays like a single episode in Mara’s journey from her strictly defined life as an Emperor’s Hand to her confusing life in hiding. In Issue 1, she takes down the Black Nebula leader; in Issue 2, she’s imprisoned by Imperial Intelligence Director Ysanne Isard, and in Issue 3, she escapes the Imperial Palace. A reader really gets an appreciation for Mara’s skill set, but she’s mostly a scowly, snarly faced human weapon at this point.
Then Stackpole hands the reins to Zahn, who makes Mara more sympathetic. In Issue 4, she settles into a quiet life as a waitress at “a small-time cantina in a third-rate city on a fourth-rate planet.” When Mara’s innocent boss (who looks a bit like the huggable Dexter Jettster from “Episode II”) is slaughtered by Black Nebula, she’s thrust back into the game, and in the final two issues, she single-handedly devises a complex scheme to take down the Black Nebula leader (whom, it turns out, she hadn’t killed after all).
We saw in Dark Horse’s Thrawn trilogy adaptation that Zahn’s novel writing didn’t transfer smoothly to comics. But when he’s writing specifically for comics, the result is vastly better; I suspect Stackpole, coming off the just-canceled “X-Wing” comic series, showed him the ropes for those final three issues. Although Zahn doesn’t link up “By the Emperor’s Hand” directly with “First Contact” (where Mara meets Karrde), we can assume that in the intervening few years, Mara takes more odd jobs on backwater planets to stay hidden from Isard.
One thing that “By the Emperor’s Hand” doesn’t do is delve deeper into Mara’s mind, although that’s forgivable given the timeline placement. Does she feel any regret about giving her life entirely to the Emperor? Does she have any doubts about his righteousness? Probably not yet, given that she still wants to kill Luke when they first meet in “Heir to the Empire.” But it might’ve been neat to show Mara at least working through some challenging questions.
We also don’t learn any details about Mara’s formative years here. Wookieepedia says she was pulled from her family by the Emperor much like the Jedi Order used to pull candidates from their families. It would be neat to see that story dramatized by Zahn, though. How exactly did the Emperor indoctrinate her? Would we as readers be sympathetic to the fact that she was brainwashed against her will, or would we be critical of her for not fighting it?
Although there’s no question that Mara eventually redeems herself with the help of Luke, Karrde and other good people, Zahn and other authors have perhaps been reticent to really delve into the baddest version of Mara. Admittedly, I do have some re-reading to do on this character, notably a couple of her comic team-ups with Vader, and of course Zahn’s “Allegiance” and “Choices of One.” Maybe there’s more “bad Mara” stuff out there than I recall.
At any rate, “By the Emperor’s Hand” is a wonderfully written and essential chapter in putting together the puzzle that is Mara Jade.