Marvel’s upcoming Dark Droids crossover event will resurrect a concept from the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series — the D-Squad. Marc Guggenheim, Salva Espín and David Messina will enlist a group of droids to help R2D2 battle the Scourge, the virus spreading through the galaxy’s droid population that’s making them turn homicidal.
While Dark Droids has been billed as a horror story set in the Star Wars universe, Guggenheim says the D-Squad miniseries will have a different tone.
“It’s high adventure mixed with as much humor as I could conjure. I approached it like the first Avengers movie, but with droids instead of superheroes,” he told StarWars.com.
The original D-Squad was a group of astromech droids, which is the type of droid R2D2 is. This time around the squad will feature several different types of droids, including two bounty hunters.
Here’s the description from StarWars.com:
In Dark Droids, this summer’s horror-fueled comics crossover event, a mysterious threat called the Scourge begins to corrupt droids, cyborgs, and mechanical beings of all kinds. The spinoff Dark Droids: D-Squad mini, written by Marc Guggenheim with art by Salva Espín and David Messina, finds Artoo reactivating his supercrew once more (with some personnel changes — the new lineup consists of R2-D2, IG-88, 4-LOM, WAC-47, BT-1, and 000) to combat this danger; in addition, issue #1 features a backup story starring Ajax Sigma, a new character that first appeared in last year’s Star Wars: Revelations #1, who’s promised to play a major role in the crossover as a whole.
Of course, writing droids who speak their own language provided a challenge that Guggenheim said he enjoyed.
“I won’t lie: It’s a challenge to write a comic where almost all your cast speaks an untranslatable language. At the same time, though, that’s part of the fun. In the series, we have entire pages where it’s just droids speaking to each other in binary. Fortunately, we have the perfect artist in Salva Espín. I’ve remarked numerous times to the editors that I’ve never seen a better match of artist and material. In the hands of a lesser artist, the whole story would probably collapse in on itself,” Guggenheim told StarWars.com.
Check out a few preview pages featuring the droids in action:
The miniseries will kick off in August.