Author: M. Dean Cooper

Not Automatically Good – Rethinking Star Wars Novels

Posted on March 28, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

reyhan-cockpit

“When you’re directing a scene on the Millennium Falcon, it doesn’t make the scene good. Now it’s bitchin’ that it’s on the Millennium Falcon. You want a scene on the Millennium—if I could make a suggestion, direct scenes on the Millennium Falcon, cause it’s hugely helpful. But it doesn’t make the scene automatically good.”

–JJ Abrams at San Diego Comic-Con, July 2015

One of the major recurring topics of Star Wars fandom over the last few years has been the notion that this is, in some fundamental way, a movie franchise. At face value that may seem obvious, but there’s more to it than there might seem right away. For a lot of fans, especially nineties kids like myself, far more of our formative years was spent reading Star Wars books, comics, Essential Guides, and so on than watching the films. Even once the prequel trilogy was coming out, and causing occasional headaches for the Expanded Universe, there was always an understanding that the film aspect of the franchise was not just finite but distinctly limited—they were a storm we just had to weather before the EU took over again. Just like there was never going to be an Episode VII, nor would there be a III.V, or a Zero, or a Negative Twenty. The films were Anakin’s life story, and if that wasn’t the major draw for you, no big deal. If you liked harder military science fiction, Star Wars was a novel franchise about the continuing war with the Empire. If you liked Jedi melodrama, the comics of John Ostrander and Jan Duursema were your Star Wars. If you were a gamer, Star Wars was Dark Forces or X-Wing Alliance or The Force Unleashed.

And yeah, one of the coolest things about it was that all those different pocket universes intersected and fed off of each other—at least in theory—so even if you mostly kept in one or two lanes yourself you still got to feel like part of this grand tapestry of SW fandom. Things are different now, and frankly I don’t blame some people for still not being okay with that, but it is what it is. Movies are once again steering the ship, and will be for the foreseeable future no matter what part of the timeline you’re into; that doesn’t ruin Star Wars, in my opinion, but it does necessitate a degree of realignment. What role should supplemental material—which is what the books are now, supplements—play in a movies-first franchise? What role can they play best? Read More

Rebels Revisited: Soul of Silicon, or Waste of Runtime?

Posted on March 18, 2016by , , and

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Ben: Something that I’ve praised Star Wars Rebels for for a long time now is its character development. Because it focuses on a central core of characters and tells its story in a chronological order, the show gives the characters the opportunity to learn and change as the story progresses and time passes within the narrative. We’ve seen Ezra, Kanan, Sabine and even Zeb evolve their personalities and beliefs (some more than others) as their horizons have changed, their viewpoints have been challenged and they’ve been through increasingly difficult trials.

But there are a couple of characters in the show who haven’t really evolved in that sense as we move toward the end of the show’s second season. Hera is a major one, as is our favorite ISB officer Agent Kallus. And, of course, Chopper. Character development in that sense hasn’t really happened, because none of them have really changed. The Hera we meet in this show, for instance, is basically the same Hera that we see in A New Dawn, give or take a few circumstances.

There’s another aspect to character development, though, and that’s how an audience’s perception of a character changes as we see more of them. We see Hera and Kallus differently now than we did at the beginning of the show because we’ve learned more about them. And the same can be said for everyone’s favorite grumpy astromech droid after this week’s episode. Chopper’s character after his adventure with AP-5 is the same as it is before, but we learn more about him and our own view of him evolves. Read More

The Jaxxon Factor: Are Comics Really Better Now?

Posted on March 16, 2016by , , and Not A Committee

msw-jaxxoncoverMike: When I was first acquainting myself with the Star Wars franchise in the late nineties, the volume of Expanded Universe material I felt it necessary to catch up on was already quite daunting—most of a decade’s worth of novels and comics were already out there, and more were arriving all the time. Luckily, one huge batch of content was pretty widely regarded as not worth my time: the original 107-issue Marvel Star Wars comic series. Having run from 1977 to 1986, it was more than a decade out of print by the time I laid eyes on A New Hope, and to say the stories had fallen out of fashion during the peak of the Bantam era would be an understatement. So for a long time, I didn’t see a reason to go anywhere near them.

Much later, well after the prequels were over, I finally decided to give them a go. It took two tries—first in 2009 and again in 2013 after Episode VII had been announced—but I eventually worked my way through the whole series. I got to experience firsthand things I’d been aware of in some cases only by rough description (Jaxxon, Arbra, Valance the Hunter) and in other cases by their appearances in more recent EU (Zeltrons, Nagai, and of course Lumiya). Reading almost ten years’ worth of comics over a (cumulative) span of several months, the series’s evolving tone was incredibly pronounced, from the borderline slapstick of the earliest stories to the relative seriousness of the Kiro and Tay Vanis storylines to, near the end, a tenuous balance between the two extremes as the Hiromi weaseled their way into the Nagai/Tof conflict. Read More

Escape Pod: The Katana Fleet

Posted on March 14, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

katana-beliblis

In addition to the many existing Legends stories that are ripe for adaptation in the new canon, there are some that, while full of potential, Legends never really got around to telling. One of these is the legend (ha) of the Katana fleet. Dating back to Dark Force Rising, the second book of the Thrawn trilogy, the Katana fleet was a huge force of two hundred Dreadnaught heavy cruisers that went missing thirty-two forty-five twenty-seven many years before the Battle of Yavin only to be discovered by the smuggler Talon Karrde, and eventually to become a piece in Grand Admiral Thrawn’s game against the New Republic.

The fleet was constructed at a time when the Old Republic’s power had grown stagnant—we knew that much even in 1992—and was meant to symbolize a return to greatness. All two hundred ships had their controls slaved to the flagship, meaning that they could be crewed by a scant two thousand people each (as opposed to the ships’ usual complements of sixteen thousand, or later Star Destroyer crews of more than double that). This way, the Katana fleet represented military might without militarization; the cutting-edge slave-circuit technology meant increased security for the Republic with a bare minimum of its sons and daughters put in harm’s way.

That was the plan, anyway. Upon the fleet’s launch, the crew of the Katana itself was ravaged by a deadly virus that had the fun side effect of driving them insane before it killed them. In their delirium, the crew jumped the Katana to random hyperspace coordinates and brought the entire fleet with them, never to be seen—by the Republic—again. Read More

Our Team Hasn’t Lost – Reflecting on this Year’s Oscars

Posted on March 2, 2016by , , , , , and Not A Committee

threepio-oscarMike: I’ll say this much: the Academy Awards are exciting. Much like the Super Bowl, undoubtedly the dominant yearly cultural event in modern American life, unless you make a conscious effort to tune them out entirely, it’s hard to simply have them on in the background and not get sucked in. They may not always be a good show, but they’re an exhaustively elaborate show, and like the live TV musicals that have recently become a holiday tradition, it’s fascinating to watch so many shiny and well-known moving pieces swirl around in an environment where pretty much anything can happen.

They’re so fascinating, and so elaborate, that it can be easy to lose sight of how little it really means. Popular art and culture are extremely important—we wouldn’t have written hundreds of thousands of words on this very site if we didn’t think so—and winning an Oscar certainly means a lot to any individual lucky enough to do so, but as this year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy highlighted, to win an Oscar is at best a narrowly-defined victory. And it’s certainly not an absolute guarantee of something’s value, any more than to lose one guarantees a lack thereof.

So amidst my own feverish live-tweeting Sunday night, it was disheartening to see a number of Star Wars fans—though, I speculate, a comfortable minority—express shock and even rage as The Force Awakens lost one, then another, and eventually all five of its nominated categories. Whatever you think of Mad Max: Fury Road or Ex Machina or The Hateful Eight, they’re each singular films with nothing near the weight of the Star Wars franchise behind them, and personally I can’t help but root for spunky underdogs. Read More