By Anna Heneise
The 2002 comic series Jango Fett: Open Seasons contains everything a tragic backstory should— the murder of Jango’s family, his promising career as a child soldier, the violent death of his mentor, the total slaughter of the mercenary army he inherited leadership of from his dead mentor at the hands of the Jedi, a brief stint in slavery, a quest for revenge culminating in watching the man who killed his mentor eaten by wild animals. In four short issues, every traumatic event of Jango’s short life is neatly explained, but the comic reveals almost no personal details outside of the trauma. Nothing of his childhood, nothing of his parents or sister before their deaths, very little of his relationship with Jaster Mereel, the mercenary who raised him after their deaths. The text asserts he was a good man and a good leader, but does not show why. This choice is both frustrating for fans of Jango Fett and fascinating from a literary perspective, because the story is not told by Jango. The story is told by Count Dooku.
A framing device is a literary device wherein a story is contained within a story; often when a character in the present recounts a story from their past, or a story about another character. The events in the present provide context for— provide a framework— for events in the past. The frame for Jango’s story is Count Dooku’s investigation into his history and potential suitability as the Prime for the planned clone army. Issue #1 opens with Dooku, or Darth Tyranus, reporting to Darth Sidious on his search for the Prime clone, and his confidence that Jango Fett will handily beat what is left of the competition. Sidious wants to know his reasoning, and so the story begins.
Some of Dooku’s sources remain vague. In Issue #1 whoever passed on the details of the deaths of Jango’s family are credited only as “former associates.” In Issue #2 one particular associate is introduced: Silas, a former member of Jaster’s Mandalorian mercenary army and Jango’s loyal follower. Dooku tortures him for the information he wants on Jaster’s death, and when he has it, kills him. Issue #3 centers on the massacre at Galidraan. Dooku needs no external sources for this story, as he was the one who led the Jedi against the Mandalorians. It was at Galidraan his interest in Jango began; the only survivor, who managed to kill six Jedi before he was brought down. Cloning an army of Jedi killers from a man known galactically as a proficient Jedi killer just seems like a smart business decision. In Issue #4, Dooku finally has a face to face meeting with Jango, and Jango recounts what happened to him after he was handed over to the Governor of Galidraan. It is the only time Jango speaks for himself.
Framing devices inherently contain an element of unreliable narration. Every narrator has an agenda, including the author. Knowing who tells the story and why on both a textual level and an authorial level is integral to understanding what information is included and excluded, and how the information is spun. Open Seasons is emblematic of the way multiple retellings of a story by different narrators with different agendas can just as easily strip away details as embellish them.
Who told Dooku the story of Jango’s parents? Everybody who was present at the event was either killed or a member of one of two mercenary armies who proceeded to wipe each other out over the next decade. It’s possible the locals who cleaned up the bodies pieced together the facts, but they would have no way of knowing what was said or who shot first. It’s possible Jango passed on the story on to a friend outside of his Mandalorian comrades, but he would have been an adult recounting a traumatic event that happened when he was a child. Dooku tortured Silas’ story out of him, and confessions made under torture are unreliable at best and outright false at worst. Dooku was at Galidraan, but he was on the Jedi’s side of things. He would not have been able to get the Mandalorian perspective because he made sure Jango Fett was the only Mandalorian survivor. Jango himself is permitted to tell of only the most recent years of his life, coincidentally the years during which he became a bounty hunter and put work into building and maintaining a reputation as brutal, and even this story is conveyed to the readers through Dooku.
Framing devices are often seen as a gimmick, a way to ease readers into flashbacks or lore dumps, but as an established literary device they serve to determine the pacing and shape the structure of a story by controlling the way information from outside the present is integrated and interpreted. Framing devices give insight into a narrator’s agenda.
Jango has an agenda. What he tells Dooku about his past will determine if he is hired or not. Silas had an agenda— escape the pain as quickly as possible. The nameless sources from Issue #1 had agendas that the readers cannot even guess at because no information is shared as to how they came to know what they knew and how they came to pass it on. Dooku, out of every narrator present in the story, has perhaps the most obvious and specific agenda. Open Seasons is not about who Jango Fett is as a person, or how his history shaped him. The entire comic is Dooku’s pitch to Sidious for why Jango would be the perfect Prime clone. Every detail that could have humanized him is excluded in Dooku’s retelling in an effort to make Sidious see Jango Fett as a monster from which could be crafted an army of monsters.
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