Blue Milk Special

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Seen here is the appearance of the Emperor’s Force Lightning… well not really. I’m about to get really geeky and anal about Star Wars trivia, so my apologies in advance to all our more chillaxed readers. This isn’t really the first appearance in pseudo canon of Force Lightning. Read the excerpt below to get a handle on this and compare it to the artist’s rendition for the Dark Horse Comics adaptation. Also, note that Vader had just leapt in the air and thrown his lightsaber at Luke, knocking Luke’s lightsaber to the ground. Vader is slowly landing (using his Forciness I guess) as this excerpt begins.

As Vader drifted slowly back to the floor he grabbed his right wrist with his left hand, made a fist, and seemed to convulse like a man retching. A ball of pure white energy the size of his fist materialized in front of Vader’s hands and moved down toward the wide-eyed Luke.
Something made Luke realize he could never reach his saber before the white globe touched him. He threw up both hands and looked away. So he didn’t see what happened.
His hands seemed to blur. The white globe struck him, bounced back, and contacted Vader gently as the latter touched the ground. There was a soft crack as of an explosion far in the distance. Vader was knocked head over heels and the globe vanished.

But when the white energy ball had touched Luke’s hands, the power inherent in the kinetite, or restrained energy globe, had thrown him to the ground. Had he resisted it unsuccessfully it would have thrown him across the chamber and through the temple wall.
Now he lay on his belly while Vader rolled slowly onto his side, shaking his head in disbelief. His eyes re-focused, to see a shaken but otherwise unharmed Luke crawling slowly toward his lightsaber.
“Not… possible!” Vader muttered, starting to crawl toward his own weapon. The left side of his body armor was dented inward as if by a giant’s fist, where the kinetite had struck. “Such power… in a child. Not possible!”

—Splinter of the Mind’s Eye – Chapter 12 – By Alan Dean Foster

The kinetite (or restrained energy globe). LOL. I love how the narrative suddenly inserts this optional description for the reader completely breaking the already awkward flow. The Kinetite energy attack (or restrained energy globe) that Vader summoned in epileptic fashion and threw at Luke is described as a white globe of energy, that moves slowly towards its target (though not so slowly that Luke can retreive his lightsaber, or take a leak in some shadowed corner of the temple). The Dark Horse comic does much to undermine this and give it the appearance of Force lightning.

Hope you liked today’s strip. I’d been sitting on Vader’s “Forciness” catchphrase for nearly a year, waiting for it to make its debut in Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Inspired, of course, by Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”, and I believe BMS Vader’s first true catchphrase. Apart from Biggs’ line “Then my work here is done” or Ackbar’s “My Mon Calamari sense is tingling…” BMS has never really been much of a catchphrase strip. I hope Forciness takes off, and I hope if it does, that people remember where it first appeared! ;=

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