Author: M. Dean Cooper

Why the End of Darth Vader is Great News for Star Wars Comics

Posted on June 6, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

noto-vaderluke

No, not the end of Darth Vader the character—I just couldn’t resist using that amazing image by Phil Noto. I’m talking about Darth Vader, the ongoing comic series by Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca. When the series kicked off in February of last year, Gillen was very clear that this book had a specific story to tell: how its titular character went from his embarrassing defeat and loss of the Death Star in A New Hope to perhaps the height of his power, leading Death Squadron in the hunt for the Rebel base in The Empire Strikes Back. Earlier he likened the arc to that of Frank Underwood in House of Cards, and while that series has gone to great lengths to keep its, ahem, house of cards standing much longer than the story it’s based on, Gillen announced last month that he had gotten to his endpoint faster than even he had anticipated:

“…we’ve always said all the way through, from Darth Vader #1, that this was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And we kind of looked where we were after Vader Down, and we realized we were probably actually nearer to the end than we thought we were. And it was a situation where we were like, ‘Okay, it’s better to actually end this story in a way which we think is the most effective. We don’t want to pad it out extraneously.’ That was the kind of thing, we were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is the end of this particular story,’ in which case it’s a natural place for Vader to move on.”

While I’m a big fan of Gillen’s writing and Vader has often surpassed Jason Aaron’s Star Wars series over the past year, I met this news with a certain amount of relief. In the world of comics, especially from Marvel and DC, a creator getting to tell the entire story they set out to tell—and then, maybe just as importantly, actually ending the series at that moment—isn’t as common as you might think. So knowing that Gillen was allowed to wrap things up in a way that doesn’t just tee up a new creative team a month later is a big sign that Marvel’s Star Wars line is being handled in a healthy way, and makes me more excited to see where they go from here. Read More

Worldbuilding 102 with Jason Fry

Posted on June 1, 2016by

jasonfry-classroom

Welcome to the second half of Worldbuilding with Jason Fry! In lieu of imminent Star Wars news, this interview serves any aspiring authors out there as a primer on the development of a fictional universe, based on the lessons Jason has learned from his ongoing series The Jupiter Pirates. On Friday, we began with the broadest of strokes, namely the fictional history of a future-set story and how you get from Point A to Point B (spoiler: start with B), and moved on to original characters, and how to approach the morality of your protagonist and supporting characters. Below we’ll continue that line of thought, then move on to superficial details (or are they?) like character names, and what to do when you’re tempted to retcon something. Enjoy!

While we’re discussing morality, I want to close out this section with something that’s been in the back of my head since I read the first book, Hunt for the Hydra. Even in a universe that’s billed as space fantasy—meaning not especially subject to realism—it’s always sort of uncomfortable for me to read a story set in a future that’s not explicitly dystopian but nevertheless seems to have regressed in social areas.  What I’m thinking of specifically is the crewers aboard the Shadow Comet; they come across very clearly as a lower class than the Hashoones, often if not always less educated and mannered, and in some cases are even the second or third or god-knows-what generation of their family to serve as gunners or cooks or what-have-you for the Hashoone family. There’s no indication that they’re particularly unhappy or underpaid, but nevertheless it’s very easy to get a whiff of “indentured servitude” here—and I can only imagine how much worse it is on other ships.

In an historically-set pirate story I’m sure this kind of thing would be very accurate, but I have to admit it’s sort of depressing to read about a society this far in the future that still has such gigantic class disparities, and it’s always in the back of my head when Tycho and Yana are ordering around people two or three times their age, or visiting slums on what seems like every moon they come across, or fending off press gangs in your short story “The Trouble With Crimps”. Am I overthinking this? Do you see it as a necessary evil for a pirate story that you worked backwards to justify, or worse, do you think the story is subtlely making the case that this is something we’ll never get past? Read More

Worldbuilding 101 with Jason Fry

Posted on May 27, 2016by Interviews

jasonfry-classroom

The last time Jason Fry and I digitally sat down together, The Force Awakens was right around the corner and a deluge of Force Friday books had just swept away everybody’s mental real estate. Even in a two-part interview, it was a huge challenge to cover everything Jason was then involved with in the world of Star Wars without asking a hundred questions. So it was actually kind of a relief that this time the decks were nice and clear—we know he’ll have things coming out this fall in conjunction with Rogue One, but it’s a mite too soon for any real detail on those (hell, even any fake detail).

What, then, should we talk about? Well, he does have one thing coming out just around the corner (June 14th, to be precise), something with a long history of coming up in these interviews of ours—The Rise of Earth, the third book in his original series The Jupiter Pirates. Something that’s also come up a lot is Jason’s advice on designing a world like JP’s from scratch; how that process was informed by his Star Wars experiences, and vice-versa. I know a lot of us SW fans have dabbled in original fiction inspired by our fandom (some, like Bryan Young and Tricia Barr, have even released their own stories and gotten invited to do SW as a result), so I thought rather than do a straight interview entirely about a non-SW series, it would be fun to frame this as sort of a seminar in worldbuilding, covering everything from the first steps to the finishing details, and even post-publishing.

First up we’ll discuss the foundations of the Jupiter Pirates universe—why it is the way that it is—and how they inform the messages present in the work, both deliberate and happenstance. Then in the second part on Wednesday (we’ll be off for Memorial Day) we’ll look at smaller stuff like naming characters, and how to handle errors that come up once a book is committed to paper. Read More

Fatal Faves: Shadows of the Empire

Posted on May 18, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

shit-eating-grin

A long time ago, in another millennium entirely, I had only just discovered Star Wars via the Special Editions and I was hungry for more. The Paradise Snare, book one of A.C. Crispin’s Han Solo Trilogy, was my first SW book, but I didn’t actually choose for it to be—it was the summer of 1997, my fifteenth birthday was coming up, and I asked my mother to get me what seemed like the most exciting, natural entry point into the world of the Expanded Universe. No, not Heir to the Empire—Shadows of the Empire. I don’t even know how I actually managed to hear about it, since I didn’t own a single piece of merchandise at this point, but somehow there were enough remainders of its huge multimedia bonanza the previous year that it got through to my young, ignorant brain that this was an Important Story.

Exactly how hard my mother looked for it—it would’ve been out in paperback by this point—will forever remain a mystery, but one way or another she eventually settled on Paradise Snare instead. I can only imagine what was going through her head as she browsed through things like The Crystal Star and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye before deciding for some unknowable reason that that was the right call, but in retrospect, it actually was a pretty good call. Not only was the HST a great story, but Paradise Snare being set as early in the timeline as it was led to me reading the entire Bantam era pretty much in chronological order, which had a huge impact on how I ultimately became familiar with stories like Dark Empire, the Corellian Trilogy, and yes, Shadows of the Empire. Read More

What Owen and Shmi Can Teach Us About Han and Leia

Posted on May 4, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

hanleia-reunion

Intrinsic to the premise of a sequel trilogy—obviously—is the notion that Return of the Jedi was not, in fact, the end of the Star Wars story. Proceeding from that, there are two basic strategies with which to approach further material; the Bantam-era Expanded Universe tried one in which the characters lived more or less happily ever after, and The Story would therefore concern itself only with minor trials and tribulations; speedbumps instead of true pitfalls. Eventually that approach turned off enough people that the Del Rey-era EU took the second road: one along which things could really go horribly wrong.

But let’s not get into all that again. The thing is, the missteps of late Legends notwithstanding, you can’t do a true follow-up to the original trilogy without Big Things Going Wrong. It wouldn’t be as interesting for new audiences who weren’t desperate for as much Big Three material as they could get, and it certainly wouldn’t have been interesting enough to drag all three original actors back into their respective robes, hair buns, and stripey pants.

Proceeding from that, then, is the unpleasant fact that getting new movies means our beloved Big Three had to fuck some things up. Read More