
“Give in to your hatred! Use your anger to fuel your strength!” These are a couple of the more common mantras known and practiced by the Sith in the Star Wars franchise. These mantras also strive to keep a Sith locked onto his opponent when in combat so as to anticipate the next move. In the Star Wars Visionary comic “Old Wounds,” the antagonist Darth Maul, at this point now just Maul, becomes the embodiment of these Sith principles and it is ultimately his downfall. Focusing effort towards a goal is beneficial, but too much focus on one point can make someone lose sight of the whole picture and those missed or dismissed details can end up being quite important.

In the last frame of page 10 in “Old Wounds” there is a long, establishing shot which utilizes both color scheme and character sizes. The setting of the shot is a farm on a desert planet at sundown. The type of shot and character sizes work in conjunction to let the reader know how the situation stands. Maul stands in the middle of the frame cloaked in dark cloth with only his arms and cybernetic legs showing. To Maul’s left is Owen, whom Maul has temporarily disabled, and to Maul’s right is Owen’s wife and a young child. Only Maul is wearing dark colors and his arms are covered in deep, blood red and black tattoos. This symbolizes that Maul is aligned with darkness and evil. Owen, his wife, and the child are all wearing light colored clothing to show their innocence and oppositeness to Maul. The fact that it is sundown is important because of the effect this has on the shadows. These shadows get continually longer, thus symbolizing Maul’s growing power in the shot. Maul has his back to the frame, however, and is seemingly unconcerned with Owen and his family. 

The bottom-left frame on page 14 of “Old Wounds” shows Maul fighting and older man wearing light clothing. These two are hashing it out in the background while the foreground contains Owen’s wife checking on him and asking if he is ok. In other frames, this older man fighting Maul is revealed to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom Maul has fought before and been beaten by, hence his cybernetic legs. Obi-Wan is pictured as leaping above Maul for a downward stroke while Maul is advancing speedily towards Obi-Wan on the ground. Obi-Wan is mostly visible due to his light clothing and because he is facing the sun. Despite the setting sun being at Maul’s back, he is still mostly silhouetted because of his darker colors. The foreground figures of Owen, his wife, and the child are also slightly silhouetted to show that they are currently not an essential part of the conflict. This frame goes against the norm by emphasizing the background figure as more important than those in the foreground.

In the next study frame, or series of frames, Maul is grimacing with Obi-Wan’s deactivated lightsaber pressed against Maul’s forehead. Obi-Wan’s thumb is hovering over the activation button, ready to reactivate his lightsaber and kill Maul. An extreme close-up of Obi-Wan’s face reveals that he in struggling with his decision of whether or not to kill Maul. Obi-Wan knows that he cannot let Maul live but is still struggling with killing him. Maul seems to sense this in the extreme close-up of his face. Maul’s grimace is also reminiscent of a snarl, as if he is daring Obi-Wan to push the button and put a smoking hole through Maul’s head. The lightsaber is poised and it can all be ended but Obi-Wan is still having a hard time deciding to do it.

In the last study frame, Obi-Wan, an injured Owen, and Maul’s corpse can all be seen. Owen is holding his rifle which Maul broke across Owen’s face in the beginning of the comic. Owen also stands in a somewhat menacing position, a scowl on his face and blood dripping from a gash on the side of his face. He is fully illuminated by the setting sun and his light-colored clothing, along with his injury, present him as the “injured-but-not-beaten” secondary hero of the story. Obi-Wan is half-silhouetted and is standing halfway out of the frame. He is holding his hands out away from his body in a surprised way. It can be inferred from Maul’s smoking head that the killing blow was not delivered by Obi-Wan but was in fact delivered by Owen and his rifle. Maul met his end in a way that neither he nor Obi-Wan had predicted or even given thought to. Obi-Wan is obviously surprised by the turn of events in this frame. Since both Obi-Wan and Maul had forgotten about Owen since his initial injury at the beginning of the story, Owen was able to return to the fight without suffering any additional damage and ended up being the one to finish the fight between Obi-Wan and Maul. In this frame, the color themes of Maul’s corpse present the fact that he, an enemy aligned with the dark, has been beaten by those aligned with the light. His head has a large smoldering crater in the side of it due to Owen’s rifle and not Obi-Wan’s lightsaber. 