Worth the Wait

Luis explains the awesomeness of Boba Fett’s return

When I saw “Chapter 14: The Tragedy” was a short episode, I was pissed. I didn’t even know Boba was supposed to be showing up to claim his armor. But it’s basically a 30-minute fight sequence, and it’s perfect. Whereas the veneer of Vader has been stripped away over the years to expose a whiny teen, Boba Fett has only gotten cooler and more impressive. I had books about him before even Return of the Jedi came out. He was the pinnacle of cool. He was the ultimate badass talking back to the most menacing bad guy at the time in Empire Strikes Back: “He’s no good to me dead.” He sassed Lord Vader! Then the books give us all his backstory as a bounty hunter. Then he was unceremoniously dumped in a Sarlaac Pit in Jedi. It was like a slap in the face to fans. He comes back in Episode II because his dad is the father of all the clones, but “The Tragedy” is what fans have been waiting to see for 40 years. He has a stick and bad armor, but he still defeats a team of Storm Troopers. Temuera Morrison has never been better. Jango Fett was not nearly as cool. George Lucas must have known what a cash cow Boba Fett was and how important it was to work him into the prequels, but no one cared about Jango. The fact that we have a weekly show about a badass cowboy Mandalorian who shows up, solves a problem, and then continues to build and build and build—it’s perfect. The Mandalorian is the best thing we’ve seen from the Star Wars universe since Empire Strikes Back. I was really angry when I fired up Disney+ and saw “The Tragedy” was such a short episode, but they made it the perfect bite size for all of us to dive back into again and again. The whole episode is badassery. If you took a vote of Star Wars fans, I guarantee you Boba Fett would be a Top 10 if not a Top 5 favorite character. His design was awesome. His backstory was tremendous. And it’s just like they created the coolest bounty hunter in the galaxy. Forty years of waiting for Boba Fett to be a badass and him actually being a badass was everything I could have asked for from that series. It was probably my single favorite episode of anything I’ve watched on Disney+. —LV

THREE MARKER CHALLENGE For a home with so many Boba Fett collectibles, we don’t have a lot of Boba art. “It’s tough to convey emotion with that character. I don’t draw a lot of fully masked characters,” Luis explained. “If you think about the characters I draw, I tend to not draw fully masked characters” really large—he seems to love them for his daily challenges in December.

Madeline Vega