Four Years After Its Divisive Disney+ Run, Book of Boba Fett Gets the Marvel Treatment

14 days ago by Kael Voss 5 min read

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Marvel Comics kicked off a seven-issue adaptation of The Book of Boba Fett on September 9, putting the galaxy's most infamous bounty hunter back on Tatooine's throne in a medium that never has to worry about pacing complaints. Here's what the comic changes, what it keeps, and why the timing matters.

The Sarlacc never got its meal, and nearly five years later, Marvel is still making sure we don't forget it.

On September 9, Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett #1 hit shelves — the opening chapter of a seven-issue comic adaptation of the 2021-22 Disney+ series, written by Rodney Barnes (Star Wars: Bounty Hunters — Hunt for the Falcon, Ahsoka) with art by Will Sliney (The Rise of Kylo Ren) and a main cover from Alex Maleev. The pitch is almost defiantly simple: Boba Fett claws his way out of the Sarlacc pit, walks into Jabba the Hutt's old throne room, and finds out that taking a crime syndicate is a lot easier than running one. The official line — does he have what it takes to keep Tatooine in order? — is the exact question the show spent seven episodes circling, and now it gets asked again in panel form.

This is the way Star Wars comics have always worked: adapt the screen thing, hand it to a new artist, see what changes when nobody has to worry about a runtime. But Boba Fett is a stranger candidate for this treatment than most, and that's what makes it worth talking about.

The show fans still argue about

Let's not pretend The Book of Boba Fett landed clean. It sits at 66% on the Tomatometer across 198 reviews and a rougher 49% with audiences on 5,000-plus ratings — critics ahead of fans, which is the opposite of how most Disney+ Star Wars shows have broken. The knock was never really about Boba Fett himself; it was that two entire episodes handed the show over to Din Djarin and left Temuera Morrison's Fett cooling his heels off-page in his own series. Great television, arguably — the Djarin detour is where the Mandalorian's own arc got its cinematic legs back — but a strange choice for a show with one bounty hunter's name in the title.

A comic adaptation sidesteps that problem by design. Barnes and Sliney are working from the same well-known outline, but a seven-issue miniseries doesn't have to borrow another show's protagonist to fill screen time. Whether the page actually spends more time with Fett than the show did is an open question until later issues land — issue #1 covers the Sarlacc escape and the opening throne-room maneuvering, the material the show also used to kick things off — but the format at least removes the temptation.

What's actually new here

The series marks the first comic appearances for a handful of the show's supporting cast: Garsa Fwip, the Twi'lek cantina owner who becomes one of Fett's closest advisors; Dokk Strassi, the towering enforcer who works Freetown's streets; and Mok Shaiz's unnamed Ithorian majordomo, who spent the show quietly playing every side against every other. None of them existed in Star Wars comics before this month — the Boba Fett show was their only appearance anywhere in canon, which made them screen-only characters in a franchise that usually cross-pollinates every format within a year. That gap just closed.

Barnes, for what it's worth, isn't approaching this as work-for-hire. He's said he's loved Boba Fett since early childhood, that adapting the series has been a complete joy, and that he can't wait for Star Wars fans to read it. That's a writer who grew up on the Kenner figure and the two lines of Original Trilogy dialogue talking, not someone slotted onto a licensing deadline.

Why bother adapting a show that's still on Disney+?

Here's the thing about a comic adaptation of a show you can just stream: it's not really competing with the show. It's arguing that the story is worth a second telling in a different shape, the same way Star Wars has adapted A New Hope a dozen times since 1977 without anyone asking why. For a show that split its own audience over structure and pacing, handing the same plot to a different medium is as close as Lucasfilm gets to a do-over without actually greenlighting Season 2 — which, four-plus years later, still hasn't happened, despite Morrison and Ming-Na Wen periodically saying they'd come back if asked.

The smart move for Marvel is putting the focus back on Fett himself, issue after issue, in the exact spot where the show wandered off. If Barnes and Sliney manage that for all seven issues, this quietly becomes the version of the story some fans wanted in December 2021. If they don't, it's still the fastest way to explain who Garsa Fwip is to anyone who skipped the show. Either way, the Sarlacc's least famous survivor is back on the throne — this time with no Mandalorian required to hold the fort.

May the Force be with us.