Elite Stormtroopers To Debut in New Star Wars Comic

Marvel is bringing a new arc of Star Wars comic; as Star Wars #20 wraps up the current story, issue #21 will launch a new adventure, and it will feature an elite group of Imperial stormtroopers, led by Sargeant Kreel, the undercover agent who was working with Grakkus the Hutt, and helped train Luke Skywalker in lightsaber-fighting. And it looks like his group of stormtroopers won't be just the typical faceless drones.

"The main thing I wanted to do was give more of a face to some of the stormtroopers," writer Jason Aaron told StarWars.com. "We've seen lots of them in the series, but they've all been pretty interchangeable, faceless bad guys. We haven't gotten to know them. That was one of my favorite parts of The Force Awakens, getting to see and getting to know a real character who was a stormtrooper and somebody who, of course, has a conscience and changed his ways and joined up with the good guys."

But the comic will focus more on invidualizing enemy characters as Creel finds out why his squad members chose Team Empire over Team Rebellion:

"This is the opposite of that. It's us peering inside the heads of somebody who is very gung-ho for the Empire and then the question, of course, is ‘Why? Why would you sign up to fight for the Empire?' That's something we'll answer over the course of the story. We wanted to put a face on those enemies and also create a formidable group of bad guys because they're up against our heroes," Aaron added.

Here are some images featuring the Elite stormtroopers:

Aaron talks about his experience working with artist Jorge Molina: "He's an awesome artist. The designs in particular, I'm really excited about. We sketched out who these guys were and what their functions were and left it up to Jorge as to what they actually looked like and what any sort of unifying theme was between these guys. I love that he brought a lot of personality to each one of them. Even though we're working with the standard stormtrooper outfit, Jorge was able to tweak it a little bit and really give each guy his own look and feel. I like that you can look at these dudes and get an idea, just from their appearance and their paraphernalia, what their specialty is. And in this first issue, these guys aren't just standing around. We get to see them leaping into action. It's completely different than anything we've done in the book so far; it's really a straightforward all-action story that focuses on the bad guys."

It would be interesting to see how the bad guys are fleshed out in the new Star Wars comic.

Star Wars #21 will be released on July.