Category: Opinion

Attack of the Trades: Skywalker Strikes Vader

Posted on November 23, 2015by

marvelcoversWith the first salvo of the trade collections of Marvel’s Star Wars material now out, it’s an excellent opportunity to kick off a new series that takes an askew look at the trades. This inaugural edition will be looking at Star Wars: Volume 1: Skywalker Strikes, Darth Vader: Volume 1: Vader, Princess Leia, Kanan: Volume 1: The Last Padawan, Shattered Empire and Star Wars: The Marvel Covers: Volume 1.

On their superhero lines Marvel have often used a core book technique, with one book being the high-profile one where the big events happen, with a second in a supporting role. One of the things they like to claim is both can be read on their own. To a degree, that is true, to another degree it’s utter rubbish. You can read the Darth Vader book without reading Star Wars, yet what goes on in the latter is often in response to what goes on in the former! Kieron Gillen does his best to enable the reader to know what they need to for the story he’s spinning, but it’s still a reductive summary at best.

The main book does indeed start off with a bang and if Marvel are doing one thing very well – it’s setting up excellent creative pairings for particular arcs. John Cassaday is not – as anyone who ever read Planetary will attest – a monthly artist, but Marvel gave him enough lead time to have all six issues done! What he has going for him is an excellent narrative style that gives a great sense of energy and movement to the panels. The story also works on the basis that while people may talk of the Force, they know little of it or what command of it permits the likes of Vader to do. Had they known? Events would have played out very differently! Read More

In the Spotlight at Last: The Return of the B-wing

Posted on November 18, 2015by

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This past week, Star Wars Rebels brought out of the shadows one of the coolest and most unique of Rebel starfighters, the B-wing. The craft, a longstanding part of the veritable “alphabet soup” that is the Alliance Starfighter Corps, hasn’t received much love compared to its far more common & iconic cousins over the years, but that has begun to change in the new canon that has cropped up in the leadup to The Force Awakens. While nearly anyone can recognize an X-wing, the B-wing fighter has been overlooked and in the shadows since its appearance back in 1983’s Return of the Jedi. In honor of this awesome craft and it’s newfound glory, let’s look back at the history of the B-wing over the past thirty-plus years.

The B-wing began its life as concept art for Return of the Jedi. Designed by artist Joe Johnson & ILM modelmaker Bill George, it began it’s life as a series of sketches, referred to as “B fighter” or “Rebel Alien Fighter”. The second name is rather telling, as the very nature and design of the fighter varies significantly from the more traditional rebel fighters like the X-wing and Y-wing. When Return of the Jedi was being developed, George Lucas instructed his ILM team to create new designs for the rebel fleet, showing that the entire Alliance was assembled to take on the Empire’s second Death Star. This team created numerous new craft that ultimately made it on screen, including Admiral Ackbar’s iconic flagship Home One, two other variants of the Mon Calamari star cruiser (winged & wingless), a smaller vessel now christened the Dornean Gunship, the speedy A-wing, and the B-wing. Read More

On “Forwards Coordination”, and those other Star Wars Rebels comics

Posted on November 16, 2015by

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When you’ve been an Expanded Universe fan as long as I have, the different tiers of canon become sort of a sixth sense. I’m partly referring to the old Lucas-era system of letter grading—G-canon for the movies, C-canon for the novels, and so on—but even now, in the post-reboot phase where everything is considered canon, the more jaded fans out there will be happy to point out that no big-budget film director is likely to change his story because of a line in a years-old novel. That was certainly true of the Thrawn trilogy and its ilk, but many see it as equally true for books like Tarkin or Twilight Company, both of which lay down a lot of pipe, so to speak, regarding the status quo of eras that could easily be the subject of a spinoff film one day. What will happen, on that fateful day? I don’t know, but at a minimum I can understand skepticism on the matter.

But in the meantime, that same forgone conclusion—that the different forms of media constitute a hierarchy rather than a totally level playing field—is already playing out at the fringes of the franchise. Last month saw the US debut of Star Wars Rebels Magazine, a very child-focused periodical that’s been coming out in the United Kingdom since January. The bulk of the magazine is simple puzzles and little splashes of trivia not unlike Adam Bray’s recent Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, but each issue also features an original twelve-page comic story, most by English writer Martin Fisher. The stories are simple, befitting their length, but they’re solidly told and with nice art (Ingo Römling’s in particular) to boot. Twelve pages is about half the length of an issue of a typical American comic book, and with issue #10 having hit the stands in the UK last month, that means these comics have amassed almost as much material on the lives of the Rebels cast as the ongoing Kanan series from Marvel.

But while the latter is written by one of the series’ creators and has even been referenced, if obliquely, in episodes of the TV show, the Rebels Magazine comics are hermetically sealed—they utilize the first season’s complete bag of tricks, but nothing gets out. Read More

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Speculation

Posted on November 11, 2015by A Certain Point of View

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With roughly a month and a half left until the premiere of The Force Awakens, promotion is ramping up and speculation is running wild. And while there’s more BB-8s than you can shake a stick at, one character has been conspicuously absent so far: Luke Skywalker.

J.J. Abrams is well known for keeping movie plots and key characters close to the chest. He loves to talk up the “mystery box” concept and is a proponent of the idea that the mystery is more exciting than the revelation. And all this secrecy has led many Star Wars fans to wonder if perhaps Luke didn’t become the Jedi Master we all expected but perhaps…fell to the dark side instead.

There would definitely be a certain poignancy in having the Big Bad of the sequel trilogy be the former celebrated hero of the original trilogy. The story of Star Wars is about the struggle between good and evil; more specifically it is about how everyone has the capacity for both good and evil and that it is your choices that matter. Anakin and Luke both follow the hero’s journey but come to wildly different endings, one tragic and one heroic. They act as foils to one another and show how little choices eventually build up into something good or something evil. But to say that Luke will be evil in The Force Awakens is, I think, a misunderstanding not only of Luke’s character development but also a misunderstanding of the type of hero Luke Skywalker is.

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On “Boycott Star Wars”, Chuck Wendig, and Strategic Avoidance

Posted on November 9, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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As the release of The Force Awakens gets ever closer, Star Wars is reentering the public consciousness to a degree not seen since 2005—when Twitter and Tumblr didn’t exist, and YouTube and Facebook barely existed. Within Star Wars fandom, TheForce.Net was still the dominant fan news source, and Wookieepedia was a brand-new idea. For both real-world and internet culture, it was a very different time.

And now that it’s happening again, we’re seeing some growing pains as our beloved franchise reenters the mainstream. To my mind, another term for “mainstream” is “lowest common denominator”; and in addition to the many awesome new fans, we’re also earning extra attention from the worst people the internet has to offer—people who have had a decade to coalesce and to practice raising hell. Kathleen Kennedy, bless her heart, seems perfectly happy to challenge those people on every front, by not only adding several women and people of color to TFA, but putting them right out front—while at the same time, Star Wars is represented on television by a group of entirely nonwhite protagonists, and in publishing by more female Imperials than you can shake an E-11 at and more new queer characters than existed in the last thirty-plus years put together.

But this piece isn’t about character diversity and how cool that all is; we’ve made our feelings clear on that by now. Instead, I want to make a larger point that proceeds from diversity being self-evidently a good thing; in fact, that I don’t feel the need to argue that position right now is the point I want to make. Read More