Star Wars: Rebels - Spark of Rebellion Cinestory Comic

Joe Books is a Canadian publisher that was founded in 2014 by the former Vice President of Boom! Studios, Adam Fortier.  To date, they have published only licensed material comprised mostly of comics and mostly for Disney.  Their first published offering is a Cinestory adaptation of the Disney movie Frozen.  A Cinestory comic is Joe Books' brand name for a fumetti, which is a particular type of comic which used photographs or stills and marries them with word balloons to tell the story.  Tokyopop had published fumetti's for the original and prequel Star Wars trilogies as well as a Clone Wars issue under the brand Cine-Manga which Dark Horse published in the U.S. in 2007 and 2008.  Joe Books started out publishing Cinestory comics based on Disney animated properties and collections of previously published Disney comics.  In 2016, they began publishing original content comics for several Disney properties.  In 2016, they also published several text novels based on Marvel superhero characters.  In July 2016, they solicited a graphic novel, Star Wars: Rebels Cinestory Comic, but that graphic novel never materialized and orders were canceled.

It turns out Joe Books still had plans to release the Rebels Cinestory comic, they just were slow on getting it ready for publication.  (Apparently, this is a common problem with Joe Books.)  Just this month, they published Star War: Rebels - Spark of Rebellion Cinestory.  It is a massive 378 page softcover graphic novel and measures 6 inches by 9 inches which is slightly smaller than the dimensions of a standard comic.  This book adapts the first five episodes of the Rebels animated series to comics and more Rebels Cinestory comics are planned.

The book is priced at $14.99 and you learn why such a massive book has this low price when you see the content.  The pages are in color, but the transfer of the stills from the cartoon to the pages produces a very muddy look and the bright colors found on the television show are lost on the page.  The panels are dark and grainy and on many pages you wouldn't know the comic was printed in color.  I love the idea behind these Cinestory comics, but it is a shame that such a colorful show could not be captured better on these pages.  Still, for only $14.99, it is not a terrible way to recapture the animated episodes and hopefully the printing process improves with subsequent issues.

Star Wars: Rebels - Spark of Rebellion Cinestory Comic a - Joe Books, U.S. (July 2017)

Star Wars: Rebels - Spark of Rebellion Cinestory Comic a - Joe Books, U.S. (July 2017)
back cover

Interestingly, Joe Books is now the fourth publisher of comics in the United States after Marvel, Disney-Lucasfilm Press, and IDW.  Unfortunately, the graphic novel was not re-solicited by Discount Comic Book Service, so I had to purchase my copy off of Amazon.  In addition to more Rebels Cinestory comics, Amazon is soliciting both a softcover and hardcover Cinestory comic of the original Star Wars movie.