Author: Ben Crofts

The Rules of Buying Star Wars Comics (or any comics)

Posted on June 24, 2015by Obiwomble's Outlook

swcovers-young

So, Padawan, you wish to acquire some Star Wars comics having heard tales of one million sales? This is not a road for the faint hearted or those unable to be flexible. You believe you are neither? Very well, let us begin.

Rule 1: Know what is coming out when

Surely this is easy? There is release data all over the internet! Indeed it is and that is the problem, how much of this data is reliable? The answer is, exceedingly little. There is but one reliable source of information for what comics are coming out for a given week and it is Diamond Comics. Diamond Comics are not a comic shop or a chain but instead are the distribution agents for all the monthly comics. It is Diamond who get the comics to the shops for you to buy, therefore it is their info that is the most reliable. (Monopoly, I hear you say? Yes they are and if we go into that this will be a multi-part article, suffice to say that that’s simply the way it is!)

Diamond always have two lists online – one of confirmed releases for the Wednesday of a week and one of tentative releases for the following Wednesday, which is confirmed the Sunday before. Links to them are:

Confirmed Releases

Tentative Releases Read More

No Sleep Till Bespin – On Hyperspace Travel Times

Posted on May 22, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

Hyperspace_falcon

One of the best selling points of the canon reboot has been the opportunity to revisit troublesome details in the worldbuilding of the Galaxy Far Far Away that were either ill-conceived to begin with, or became overcomplicated as the years went on and new stories piled up. One detail that was confusing from the get-go is exactly how fast hyperspace is. For one thing, the film characters call it “light speed”, when it’s clearly got to be way, way faster than that—in fact, the films also tend to suggest each transit takes no more than a few hours; no one brings a change of clothes before departing Tatooine for Alderaan, and Luke doesn’t seem very stiff or grubby when he exits his X-wing on Dagobah.

So maybe you can’t blame the Expanded Universe for never really ironing out these inconsistencies; they didn’t have much to go on. When I raised this topic to the others, David Schwarz pointed out that West End Games’ original table for the transit times depicted in the original trilogy (below) actually contained a typo that suggested all these trips took a matter of days, not hours—which might have been more sensible, but certainly doesn’t seem to be the films’ intent, and isn’t that more important?

Meanwhile, one of my own favorite examples dates all the way back to Heir to the Empire—the Star Destroyer Chimaera, with a hyperdrive faster than even the Falcon‘s, takes five days to travel from Myrkr to Wayland. Look for those two planets on the Essential Atlas‘ galactic map and you’ll find them practically right on top of each other at the coordinates N-7. So if it takes five days to go that tiny distance (and it’s not a freak detail; multi-day hyperspace journeys factor into the Thrawn trilogy alone on multiple occasions), how the hell did Luke survive a trip from Hoth (K-18) to Dagobah (M-19) without his body eating straight through that flight suit? Read More

Death Is The Drug

Posted on May 15, 2015by Obiwomble's Outlook

Chewbacca_SernpidalWith apologies to Roxy Music’s “Love Is The Drug”:

Death is the drug I’m thinking of
Oh oh can’t you see
Death is the drug for me

Death as a story device is one that goes all the way back, it’s always been used in tales – but has it always been expected ahead of a tale? Over the last fifteen years there has been a shift from death as story device and surprise to anticipating character deaths before a story is released and even requiring stories to have character deaths. Is this always beneficial and is it always warranted?

In terms of how to approach a story, bringing the death aspect to the fore tends to be to that story’s detriment, as the death eclipses all else. Vector Prime is not the book that started the Vong invasion, it’s the book that killed Chewie! After that Del Rey were, in a way, locked into killing someone else, which they did two years later in Star by Star with Anakin Solo. An unwitting consequence of these acts was the creation of a ‘who will they kill next’ line of thought. The answer to that turned out to be another Solo kid, more Jedi, another Chief of State, several of Luke’s old girlfriends and I’ve likely missed a few. Read More

From A to B? Really?

Posted on May 8, 2015by Obiwomble's Outlook

reyteaser

In 2006, Dark Horse Comics began Star Wars: Legacy. This series took the bold step of moving a century ahead of the then-current stories, considering the likely long-term consequences of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. In this new world, the Sith had returned in a new form, revived by a fallen Jedi from the prequel era. Wait, should not said Jedi be dead? Ah, no, he was on Korriban in a time dilation bubble! Despite this, the creative team’s backstory for their book only went back a decade, leaving a gap of about eighty years.

What then followed was one of the biggest tragedies of fandom. Once Legacy’s future was posited, it became all that anyone could see even with that time gap! Added to this was a misplaced notion of generational guilt, that Luke, Han and Leia were rendered failures by the galaxy’s inability to follow their example long after they died. The idea that each generation has their own challenges, regardless of their predecessors, was buried in the outrage.

With the release in December of The Force Awakens, it is quite likely that the same attitude will recur, but on a far bigger scale. Should it? No. Why? Because be it eight decades or merely three, there is nothing that says events have to go merely from A to B. This is particularly so when the episodic nature of the SW films and the two trilogies is acknowledged. What is tragic about the outlook is it narrows down possibilities. It reduces stories to chronological pawns and damns the franchise to move forward in time at the cost of everything else. The Legends EU was practically killed, in large part, by this. Does anyone want to see that happen again, but bigger? I don’t. Read More

Yankee Canon Swap: Reboot, Year One

Posted on April 24, 2015by , , , and Not A Committee

sw2chaykinWe knew early on that a group piece would be in the cards to celebrate this, the one-year anniversary of the Legends announcement. But without really planning it, it just sort of worked out that several of us had their own larger commentaries to offer on the reboot, modern fandom, and the current state of continuity—such that by the time we got around to today’s piece, I thought something more distinct was warranted.

With that, allow me to present Yankee Canon Swap! Which is an odd title that basically means I told the gang to pick a canon story to replace with a Legends one they preferred. But! That would be too easy, and really, borderline whiny. The thing is, there are very few canon stories to choose from at this point, and (though opinions vary) there isn’t really one universally agreed-upon stinker in the bunch that would make for an easy answer—so what I wanted was to get us thinking about Bigger Things than just which stories we liked and which we didn’t; I wanted to talk about priorities, by potentially forcing ourselves to reject a good canon story because what it represented wasn’t important enough to us as what some other story represented. Read More