STAR WARS: TAG & BINK ARE DEAD #2

By: Arnold T. Blumberg
Date: Thursday, December 06, 2001

Damn, this just wasn't long enough! Now why does Dark Horse persist in churning out issue after issue of Sith Tales and Jedi This and Dark That, all of it a torrent of pseudo-STAR WARS garbage that barely justifies its printing and distribution costs, when they have Rubio and Co. right here producing something faithful to the original films and yet so brilliantly subversive that it just inspires nonstop laughter? Perhaps this isn't the po-faced respectable STAR WARS that Lucasfilm would prefer as the primary comic book presence for the franchise (although let's face it, they let this one get by, didn't they), but it's a hell of a lot better than all the rest of it combined. This series actually entertained...and now it's over.

Taking a page from Tom Stoppard's classic riff on HAMLET, the play ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, which interwove itself into the already existing genius of William Shakespeare's famous play, Rubio has crafted a story that weaves its way in and around the first two films in the original STAR WARS trilogy. We follow two Rebel louts named Tag and Bink, and their personalities and IQ quotients match their names perfectly. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did before them, Tag and Bink wander through the larger canvas of a grand saga with no conception of the enormity of the events in which they play their tiny, unwitting parts. They are, quite simply, blissfully ignorant morons who blithely engage themselves in the worst possible situations and then, as all morons touched by divine favor are wont to do, somehow manage to extricate themselves from certain doom at the last second. They are blessed, but man are they stupid. And yes, they are also brilliantly funny.


Picking up from last issue, which followed Tag and Bink from Princess Leia's shuttle at the beginning of A NEW HOPE through to the trench battle at the end of that first film, issue #2 finds the two hapless fellows escaping death, matching wits (haha) with Boba Fett, conning Lando Calrissian into giving them some mechanical assistance, and then returning to Rebel headquarters in glory. As with the first issue, Rubio expertly injects his anti-heroes into existing STAR WARS sequences, revealing that many of the nameless character pairs we saw in those movies were actually Tag and Bink moving through the action. Those two stormtroopers that Kenobi befuddled? The two TIE fighter pilots hand-picked by Vader? The stormtroopers that blast C-3PO on Cloud City? Yup, it's always them, just trying to survive and completely unaware of their role in a much bigger picture. The results are hilarious and at times almost heart-rending who knew that throughout STAR WARS we were constantly meeting these same two guys in a variety of guises and watching their lives slowly falling apart?

Fans should find this a delightful addition to the STAR WARS story we've all known and loved. The excellent artwork by Marangon and Shum is cartoonish in a DROIDS kind of style and yet not as cloying (and of course, thanks to the time period, no Ewoks in sight...yet). Best of all, Tag and Bink turn out to be the unknown Rebels who stole the shuttle Tydirium used by our main heroes in the middle of RETURN OF THE JEDI. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, these guys get to bask in the glory...although to be honest, we really don't know what happens to them after they come back to home base. Come on, Dark Horse, let's see TAG & BINK II!

STAR WARS: TAG & BINK ARE DEAD

Grade: A-

Issue: No. 2 (of 2)

Author(s): Kevin Rubio, Lucas Marangon, Howard M. Shum

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Price: $2.99