10 Star Wars Comics Moments That Shocked The World

6. The Origins Of The Knights Of Ren - The Rise Of Kylo Ren

Star Wars the Rise of Kylo Ren
Marvel Comics

By this point, I'm more than prepared to declare that Charles Soule comes from Star Wars. Like, he definitely lives in a galaxy far, far away. It's the only way of explaining just how many Star Wars books he's written over the last half-decade.

Soule's second-most-recent work, The Rise of Kylo Ren, was released in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker and delved deep into Ben Solo's fall. We get to see him and Luke as Master and Apprentice, learn more of their relationship with Lor San Tekka, and more importantly, the origins of the Knights of Ren.

Soule, this time joined by artist Will Sliney, reveals how Ben came to lead the Knights and what really happened on the day he left the Jedi Order behind. The end result is our closest look yet at the makeup of the Knights of Ren, and the extent of Snoke's (Palpatine's?) involvement in the destruction of Luke's Jedi Temple.

Turns out that the Knights of Ren followed a different Ren before Kylo, a maverick Force user strong in the dark side and a figure who Ben obsesses over after an encounter years earlier. Following the destruction of the Jedi Temple, Ben kills Ren and takes on the name of Kylo, thus assuming control of the Knights and completing his fall to the Dark Side.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.