Review: 'Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1'

As we've recently seen right here on Psychobabble, the Star Wars universe continues to pump out more and more stuff, often at the expense of the original trilogy's sense of whimsy and fun. That's why S.T. Bende and Iris Compiet's new book Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1 is such a breath of fresh, Endor-scented air. This book is all fun and whimsy, a pseudo-space zoologist's (plus robot buddy) star-field book logging all the weird beasties populating Tattooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Jakku, Mandalore, and all those other far-flung locales. 

The jig is never up as writer Bende fully commits to the conceit, from the introduction explaining the zoologist's background through all those detailed and lively entries on banthas, dewbacks, wampas, rancors, tauntauns, Kowakian monkey-lizards, and the rest (creatures with more humanoid characteristics, like wookiees, ewoks, and hutts, are not logged).

However, the real star of Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1 is illustrator Compiet, whose marvelous sketches and paintings of these creatures breathe life and personality into the entire enterprise. It's especially fun to see how she depicts creatures barely glimpsed or merely mentioned in the films, so we can finally put faces to all those nerfs, womp rats, and gundarks, which do indeed have ears that look like they'd require a lot of strength to pull off.