Poe Dameron

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When Marvel's Star Wars: Poe Dameron comic arrives in stores next month, it will be the first official glimpse fans have had of the dashing flyboy hero since his introduction in The Force Awakens --- and with Episode VIII still a couple of years away, the ongoing series may be the only fix of Poe we get for a while. That means there's a lot of pressure on writer Charles Soule and artist Phil Noto to satisfy the fans. Judging from the preview pages released by Marvel, we can at the very least expect entertaining skybound antics, Poe Dameron looking handsome, and some probably adorable interactions with BB-8. That's pretty good for four pages, but it does leave one big question unanswered.

Poe Dameron is probably only accidentally a gay hero. He wasn't originally meant to survive the first act of Star Wars: The Force Awakens according to writer/director J.J. Abrams, so he doesn't have a real arc of his own. On paper, Poe Dameron is just a device to advance the plot. It's in Oscar Isaac's performance that he becomes something special, and someone Abrams knew he had to keep around. Isaac gives Poe Dameron his charisma and smoldering intensity, and because his primary (human) relationship in the movie is with John Boyega's Finn, he gets to direct that charm and intensity towards him. In one of the characters' most pored over scenes together --- a scene that only exists because of Poe Dameron's reprieve from death --- the pilot gives Finn a look that's indistinguishable from lust, even biting his own lip as he tells him to keep the jacket they've come to share. It's one of the gayest things I've seen in a blockbuster movie, in the most positive and celebratory sense of the word, and it gave us reason to hope that Poe Dameron could be Star Wars' first onscreen gay hero. But is Poe Dameron actually gay, and what happens to our hopes and dreams if he's not?

They almost killed him off in the first version of the script, but it looks like the decision to keep Poe Dameron around in Star Wars: The Force Awakens has paid off. The hunkiest hero ever named for a Teletubby, Poe Dameron is going to be make the leap from the screen (and fan's dreams) to the pages of a new comic from Charles Soule and Phil Noto this spring. Announced by USA Today, Star Wars: Poe Dameron will launch in April as an ongoing, delivering tales of Poe's time with the Resistance before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. While that might mean we won't be seeing any team-ups or (more than) friendly embraces with Finn, Soule promised that this new book will flesh out Poe's character as the hot-shot flyboy in the Resistance X-Wing squadron even more.