Category: Opinion

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. XIII – Young Han Solo

Posted on June 20, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

younghan-fight

The Expanded Universe Explains series has had an interesting evolution over the last few years; originally it was a compendium of lots of actual questions posed by my friend Pearlann; once the reboot happened I then moved on to detailing stray movie references that had been told and retold in Legends multiple times (and thus, were especially in need of a reboot). That strategy eventually led me to one of the biggest messes of all—the theft of the Death Star plans.

Perhaps not all that coincidentally, that low-hanging fruit became the seed (ha, fruit pun) of the first Star Wars spinoff film—Rogue One. As such, interest in that particular piece has remained quite steady over the last eighteen months as more and more people become curious about the story. That recently led me to the conclusion that the next spinoff film, its premise also rife in Legends, was a worthwhile topic for an EU Explains, and so here we are.

24. What is Han Solo’s pre-A New Hope backstory?

Well, for starters, there’s a whole bunch of it—two entire novel trilogies, plus any number of scattered bits and pieces. If you really want to get the full young-Han-Solo experience, you’re in luck, as both the Han Solo Adventures, a self-contained trilogy by EU VIP Brian Daley, and the much more recent (and expansive) Han Solo Trilogy by Ann C. Crispin are among the best of the Legends material out there (while managing to be very, very different kinds of stories), and unlike a lot of my recent topics here, they’re pretty damn good at consistency—Crispin’s trilogy covers effectively Han’s entire life pre-ANH, meaning that at one point Han basically takes a leave of absence from his own book and the plot continues without him while the events of Daley’s trilogy are taking place. Read More

The Pull to the Light: Redemption and Salvation in Star Wars

Posted on June 10, 2016by The Works

vaderunmasked

The first six Star Wars episodes tell, in part, the story of the fall and redemption of Darth Vader. This is a common interpretation, supported by George Lucas’s own statements. But is Darth Vader truly redeemed, and what do we mean by that? What actually happens to him at the end of Return of the Jedi? This question is crucial to understanding the thematic core of Star Wars, and we must attempt to answer it if we are to speculate on the future of our newest villain: Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo.

Darth Vader

Before we explore this, we have to ask what is meant by “redemption.” Like many questions dealing with the English language, the answer is more complicated than it first appears. The first definition given by dictionary.com is:

1.

an act of redeeming or atoning for a fault or mistake, or the state of being redeemed.

This definition relies on the idea that a person atones for, or “redeems”, a mistake they have made. Is this what Vader does? This is a value judgement, so we may all come to a different conclusion, but on the whole, I would have to argue that he does not. Read More

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

Fatal Faves: Darksaber

Posted on June 3, 2016by Sidelong Glance

darksaberYou know how many people with the benefit of hindsight like to rag on Kevin J. Anderson’s work? A lot, including myself. But that’s hindsight; in his time he was an extremely influential (and prolific) author throughout most of the Bantam Expanded Universe, and regardless of the critics a lot of his works are still beloved by fans. Because of his proliferation, his work was often among the first stories that thousands of burgeoning young fans read. That includes me. My first “adult” EU book was the anthology Tales of the Bounty Hunters, where, I’ll be honest, I loved KJA’s IG-88-centric story “Therefore I Am” second most out of all of them. (What was the first? “The Last Man Standing”, of course.)

Once I had moved from the short story collections and into full-fledged novels, I was given a number of Bantam-era novels from a used bookstore for a birthday. It was a mixture of them, no complete sets, meaning I owned a third of the Crispin Han Solo trilogy, a third of the Bounty Hunter trilogy, and so on. One of the books was the KJA scribed Darksaber, a lesser book of his, not as high-profile as the Jedi Academy Trilogy or as landmark as Tales of the Jedi. The book blew my mind in a lot of ways, I recall reading it through several times, and going back over my favorite chapters more often than that.

Here’s the thing. I enjoyed so much of Darksaber, and it made such an impression on me that scenes are still stuck in my mind today. That’s more than I can say for most of the other books I had in that era (Slave Ship anyone?). When I think of the Bantam era, I think of the X-Wing series first, and then Darksaber, even before Heir to the Empire. It so perfectly exemplifies the era of Star Wars publishing for me. The story, the characters, the plot(s), the twists, everything is just so pulp, so Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Read More

The First Order: Old and New, Plans and Opportunities

Posted on May 25, 2016by Obiwomble's Outlook

huxpeeing

Sometimes creative people are akin to magicians in that they like misdirection – and where Star Wars’ newest villains, the First Order, are concerned there is a lot of going on right now. I should declare here that this is a purely speculative piece, no inside information, nothing up my sleeves… It may be nuked to high heaven by the revelations of Episode VIII, whose bombardment begins December 2017. Or, it might bolster what I lay out here. We’re not going to know for ages so let’s have some fun instead…

In the wake of Bloodline, it seems everyone is going ‘ah, that’s what the First Order is!’  This is a major error because you’re looking exactly where they want you to look, even better you are focusing on one aspect, when the enemy is rather multifaceted. Looking at the pieces available the inescapable conclusion is the First Order is a combination of pieces. It is neither precisely this or that thing, at a surface level it defies easy categorization by being a supposedly chaotic assemblage.

What are the pieces we have? There is Bloodline’s political cabal, lusting after more of everything. There is, way in the background, the successor to Brendol Hux’s Arkanis Academy. (Rebels: Servants of the Empire quartet of course, and no, I’m not going to stop mentioning it) There is a disappeared Imperial Fleet. There is the move to the Unknown Regions of much Imperial resource and materiel. There is, from Aftermath, the desire to find the source of the dark side in the Unknown Regions too. Old and new elements are all jumbled in a crazy patchwork. For something that calls itself the First Order where is the order in all this? Read More