Sithty Review - Edge of Balance Vol. 3

Alright, so for Around the Galaxy, we are going to start with kind of general information as we've done with the other mangas.

So, Edge of Balance Volume 3 was released on August 13, 2024.

Very interesting time period.

It's funny, I talk about wanting to get into political content later and...

As it stands, that is getting close to the actual election cycle, so things are heating up in 2024.

That also means that we are recording this review almost two years, a little over two years, after this manga came out.

So a lot of it, of this review, is coming from a place of...

the the story having aged and getting to sit with it for a while and that's honestly been one of my favorite parts about these reviews is High Republic's writing is so well done and so thoughtful that even after rereading it two years later it still has a lot of kind of lessons, and a lot of different ideas that really stand up to the test of time.

So it really does feel like peak Star Wars.

And one of the ways in which I mean that phrase is not just, you know, lightsabers, Jedi, galactic implications, and the other things that we know to be true in Star Wars, but also the fact that you can revisit this type of work and get new things or pull new things out of it is something that's very Star Wars, right? We rewatch different movies or TV shows and depending on how we're feeling, depending on what we're watching, depending on what we're focusing on in each rewatch, we can pull different lessons and I find that really incredible that even the manga can do that as well.

In terms of the creatives, we are back with Daniel José Older and Shima Shinya returns as well.

On the art side, we get both Shima Shinya working on some of the art and will be credited a little bit later in the manga, but also...

Mizuki Sakakibara is back, and that is a notable name because we had that name showing up in the first kind of volumes.

So we're getting back to some of the original crew, Justina Ireland being the last part of the original group, but she is not within the manga.

And It'll make a little more sense as we're going into Phase 3, right? All of the Luminous authors are writing a lot of different things, with DJO mostly handling a lot of the comic work and stuff.

So kind of in his wheelhouse to be doing the manga, while the other Luminous authors are tackling all sorts of other work.

If anything, that's going to be my... not necessarily gripe, but definitely a criticism of Phase 3, and we can talk about it a little bit later, because Volume 3 is kind of the beginning of it.

But there's just so much happening within Phase 3 that you can tell some of the authors are just really knee-deep in their thing, and it's making it so that there's stories that kind of can't be told, but there's still a lot of stories to be told.

So it is both a buffet and, at the same time, things that you just can't find out about without reading other books or other comics or consuming other media, which is fine.

It's just kind of interesting, and it shows up a little bit as we get through Volume 3.

The last piece here, of course, there is a bonus, just like all the other mangas.

It does end with an art gallery.

And picking up from my criticism, I don't say it this time with air quotes, it's still only three pages of art, all things considered, before you get the final little ads and other mangas you can buy.

But there is information with the drawings that explain a little bit of what you're seeing, or things that they wanted to kind of emphasize that have changed from phase one to phase three, because phase two, as we talked about in precedent, it goes back in time about 150 years.

So picking up in phase three, there is some time that has passed from the end of phase one, but not too much.