Author: M. Dean Cooper

Second Look – Episode VII and the Death of Luke Skywalker

Posted on December 23, 2013by

I had a bit of a quandary this month. Eleven-ThirtyEight is only a couple weeks away from its six-month anniversary, and our writing staff has done such a great job of keeping up with our schedule and maintaining a great level of article quality that I decided they’d earned the week of Christmas off. I figured at the time that there wouldn’t be much harm in just letting the site sit still over the holidays, and resuming our usual publishing schedule on the 30th.

Then Reddit discovered us. Since December 1st, we’ve had an amazing run of three or four viral “events” (epidemics?) in less than two weeks, boosting our regular traffic such that if you’re reading this post, there’s roughly a fifty/fifty chance you’d never been here before this month.

Which reminds me: hi, everybody!

So anyway, two things followed from that—one, if you just discovered ETE in the last couple weeks, the last thing we want to do is abandon you for a week just when you’ve decided this is a place worth keeping an eye on. The second thing is, you probably still haven’t seen the overwhelming majority of the content on this site.

As such, we’ll be running a five-part series this whole week called Second Look. Ever see a long-running TV show do a marathon on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, but with new interstitial bits between the episodes to keep your attention? This’ll be kinda like that. I’ve gone back through our archives and picked out five articles and/or series that I think are the real cream of ETE’s crop, and I’m going to give them another chance in the limelight. So if you’re curious about our wares, but wary of the archives, stay tuned! First up…

Episode VII and the Death of Luke Skywalker

On August 19, Lisa Schap presented one of our first pieces looking ahead to Episode VII. The sequel trilogy, Lisa felt, needed to open with a major character death akin to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s in A New Hope. Not only would such a thing drive home the stakes of the film’s new threat, but it would force the new generation of main characters to step to the plate themselves:

“They’ll need the freedom to get into their own sorts of trouble and I firmly believe one of the failings of the Expanded Universe in developing new Jedi is that Luke Skywalker is always there looming over the characters and it is difficult to believe, in universe, that the most powerful man in the galaxy wouldn’t go deal with the problem himself.”

Check it out!

In Defense of “Ugly” SFF Art

Posted on December 17, 2013by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

kickassjaina

Art is subjective.

Let’s get that out of the way, right up front. If you disagree with the perspectives expressed in this piece, I don’t think you’re a bad person. Misguided, perhaps, or even narrow-minded, but still, you’re entitled to like what you like for whatever reasons you choose to like it, and I’m equally entitled to roll my eyes at you.

Which is why I’m frequently exasperated when the Star Wars art of, say, Chris Trevas is regarded as being inherently good, and the art of, say, Scott Hepburn as inherently bad.

Trevas is an excellent artist, in my opinion—as is Tsuyoshi Nagano, the prolific Japanese artist whose name almost never comes up but whose work is goddamned everywhere. Outside of Star Wars, artists like Gabriele Dell’Otto and Greg Land are met with similar near-universal praise. All four artists are seen as exemplars of realism; of producing art that the viewer can almost believe is what a given scene or character would “really” look like. Exactly how well each of them pulls this off is again, subjective, *coughpornfacecough* but that’s fundamentally their shtick—it’s what lands a job in their inboxes instead of someone else’s.
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John Ostrander on Dawn of the Jedi, Legacy, and Character Versus Action

Posted on December 16, 2013by and Interviews

John Ostrander, alongside frequent collaborator Jan Duursema, has built up likely the most far-reaching Star Wars résumé ever—first with the prequel-era saga of Quinlan Vos, then far into the future with Luke Skywalker’s great (great?) grandson Cade in Legacy, and most recently going all the way back to the beginning in Dawn of the Jedi, which resumed this past month with the new miniseries Force War. If Star Wars history were a map, you could say that Ostrander/Duursema are the pins holding it up at the corners. John recently took the time to look back with us at Legacy‘s future, and forward at DotJ’s past.

 

 

Eleven-ThirtyEight: It’s been over seven years since Legacy first debuted in June 2007. You have been in the comic industry for decades and contributed to and/or created numerous titles. What are your thoughts on the impact Legacy had on the Expanded Universe and in your mind what is the legacy of this series?

John Ostrander: What is the legacy of Legacy? <g> To be honest – it beats me. Does it have one? It’s not something with which I concern myself very much. I do the work, I hope the stories entertain, and I let the legacy, if any, take care of itself.
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Dear Fandom: Stop Trying to Quantify Everything

Posted on December 10, 2013by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

This is a Star Wars site, and I try hard to keep us on topic (our Twitter account is a different story). However, I also try hard to keep us looking at the “big picture” instead of the minutiae, and sometimes, that means talking about larger “geek culture” issues that might exhibit themselves in SW fans, but are by no means limited to them. As such, I’ll endeavor to use franchise-relevant examples in this piece more often than not, but it should be understood that I’m not levying any charges here against SW in particular.

I’m here to say that we need to get out of the habit of assigning numerical values to every little thing. Not everything needs a number attached to it. Not everything, pragmatically, really can have a number attached to it. And some things very much should not have numbers attached to them.

This extends to ranking things, as well. Let’s face it: everyone’s favorite Star Wars movie is Empire. It’s accepted wisdom. But that will never stop a SW geek from telling you so if they’re given the opportunity, and typically continuing from there into the other five films.

I’ve never been a big RPG person; maybe that’s why I feel a disconnect here. I know a lot of us grow up in that universe—where everything from the sharpness of your sword to the firmness of your constitution has an exact value without which the game doesn’t work. I played the Knights of the Old Republic games because I wanted to experience their stories, but leveling and friend:enemy ratios and dark side points were all things I had to endure, not valuable parts of the experience in their own right.
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The Pitch – Darth Vader TV Specials

Posted on December 6, 2013by , , , , and

A couple months back, a Disney licensing brochure hit the interwebs outlining several upcoming Star Wars merchandising opportunities over the next two years—Rebels, for example, Lego Star Wars, and of course, Episode VII. But included on the list was the tantalizingly vague “Darth Vader Themed TV Specials”. While the news item included a photo of the brochure and it appears to be a legitimate thing, no official information on these “specials” has been released since. Could they be one-shot episodes from the Rebels team? Tiny interstitial animations like the original Clone Wars Animated Series? Or even fully-produced live action material? No one has any freaking idea.

Could the staff of Eleven-ThirtyEight ask for a better opening? I submit that we could not. Here’s what we’d like to see.
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