Category: Obiwomble’s Outlook

With 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

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

Marvel have now got three Star Wars titles running, shortly to be joined by a fourth. They know they have major competition from their predecessor licence holder, Dark Horse Comics, but this is something they are used to. After all, Marvel and DC have been trying to out-compete each other for years. So, what are Marvel up to now?

To some, the answer seems obvious. Marvel will do a big event, a big, bombastic event story. I would agree that that may happen, and the just-announced Journey to The Force Awakens series is one contender, but I would not expect a major event to be in the cards until 2016. Why? Marvel excel at marketing bombast, but they also excel at planning out their events. Unlike DC, Marvel often do know where they’re going and their good events outnumber their bad. If you look at how Marvel handled their Ultimate line at the start, there were no events in the way we now know them. Yet there was no shortage of both new and reinvented concepts combined with strong execution – it is The Ultimates that practically gave us Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Read More