Kylo Ren is back in The Fall of Kylo Ren, and the first issue makes one thing plain: without him, the First Order has started to come apart. The organization is shown split into squabbling camps, weakened by the absence of the figure who once held its command structure together.
That matters now because the comic is closing the gap between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, a stretch of the timeline where the First Order’s politics had been more suggestion than explanation. Charles Soule has called the state of the First Order in this issue fascinating, and the interest is easy to see once the story lays out how Kylo Ren’s return changes the balance inside the regime.
The clearest sign of that divide is the rivalry between General Hux and General Pryde. Staff loyal to Hux wear red bands around their shoulder, while Pryde’s people wear gray bands around theirs, a visual shorthand for a command structure that has stopped behaving like one chain of authority. Pryde has climbed the First Order ladder before The Rise of Skywalker, and the issue uses that rise to show that his position was not the result of order, but of competition.
The friction is not abstract. Hux complains that struggling to beat an agricultural world full of farmers is embarrassing for a military as large as the First Order, while Pryde’s sabotage of the Finalizer’s main cannons helps him win the day at Hetzal Prime. That victory gives Hux and Pryde an excuse to settle their differences quickly, but it also exposes something uglier: Kylo Ren’s return does not simply restore discipline. He uses the moment to push Hux further down the pecking order.
That is what gives the issue its weight. Kylo Ren and Hux have history going back to The Force Awakens, and the comic turns that history into a power play rather than a reunion. Hux is not just being corrected by a stronger leader; he is being humiliated inside a system that has already learned to function without a central hand, at least badly enough to splinter into rival factions.
In that sense, the issue does more than stage a comeback. It explains why the First Order looks so unstable in the run-up to The Rise of Skywalker, and it leaves the reader with the most important unresolved point in the story: once Kylo Ren orders Hux and Pryde to resolve their differences quickly, who actually holds the line afterward — and for how long?
