The Star Wars Character So Awful His Father Tried To Kill Himself To Escape
Ask a Star Wars fan who their favorite character is, and they could spend hours narrowing it down to just one. Ask a Star Wars fan who the worst character is, however, and they’ll answer faster than you can say, “Yousa peoples gunna die?” If there’s one thing that unites the Star Wars fandom, it’s hatred of Jar Jar Binks, a character so annoying his own father tried to off himself just to get away.
Back when Dark Horse Comics still held the license to print stories featuring Luke Skywalker and Co., they put out an anthology series called Star Wars: Tales. The non-canon comic book featured short stories of every genre from various creators. Stories could range from a What If? Style tale where Darth Vader takes on a resurrected Darth Maul to a silly parody of Pulp Fiction where Mace Windu and Yoda shoot the breeze in a coffee shop.
One creator, Tony Millionaire, decided to craft a darkly comic story starring the long-suffering father of Jar Jar Binks. The story follows George R. Binks of the Binks & Son Whaling Company as he attempts to take down the Star Wars equivalent of a whale. Jar Jar, through a combination of his usual clumsiness and stupidity, instead sinks the ship and gets his family marooned on a desert island.
For over a month, George is slowly driven mad thanks to his idiot son’s ridiculous antics. When Jar Jar suggests he try and swim to the mainland, George realizes the boy will never make it and encourages him to go for it. Jar Jar’s mother, however, stops her son before he can go on the fatal journey.
Unable to get rid of his son, George instead decides to “get rid” of himself. The tortured Gungun puts a blaster to his head and seems to hesitate until his wife asks him to “Think of our son!” As soon as she mentions Jar Jar, George pulls the trigger.
In what is easily the best gag in the story, George misses, at point-blank range, merely grazing his skull. Apparently, deep down, George is just as clumsy as his son.
George lies on the ground and reminisces about his lost love, Sheebla, whom he chose not to marry, ironically because she couldn’t give him any children. As the elder Binks hallucinates that Sheebla is standing in front of him, readers see that it’s actually just Star Wars’ resident screwup with a squid stuck to his face. The comic ends with George burying his head in his hands.
While suicide isn’t exactly a funny topic—nor should it be—Millionaire treats the act in a way that’s less offensive than it is pitiful. Poor George can’t even use death to escape his cursed son. Of course, the joke takes on an even darker tone when you take into account Jar Jar actor Ahmed Best’s revelation that all the hate directed at him for playing the unpopular character drove him to consider suicide in real life.
In the decades since he was first introduced in The Phantom Menace, public opinion of Jar Jar has softened somewhat. Fans who were children when the movie came out—the target audience for Jar Jar’s tomfoolery—actually feel some affection for the big goof.
Back in 2004, however, at the height of prequel backlash, Star Wars fans’ hatred of Jar Jar Binks was so intense that anyone reading the comic when it came out no doubt found it extremely relatable. We are all George R. Binks.
