Category: Opinion

What Star Wars Can Learn From Marvel Television

Posted on February 16, 2015by

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For all Marvel’s recent success at the box office with its Cinematic Universe, its small-screen efforts have thus far been a mixed bag. Most people will agree that its first series, Agents of SHIELD (I refuse to put the periods in there), got a lot better once it caught up with the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but there’s no doubt that it struggled at first to define itself, lacking both the personality and—more forgivably given its budget—the grandeur of the Marvel films. Their second series, Agent Carter, has improved by leaps and bounds over SHIELD’s debut even as SHIELD itself in its second season has begun to bring much more life and excitement to its proceedings with an expanded and more-colorful cast freed to the bureaucratic doldrums of the series’ beginning. Later this year, Marvel’s television roster will have doubled with the arrival on Netflix of both Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones, with three more series to follow further down the line—and all within the same contiguous universe as the films.

For Star Wars fans, Marvel is the ultimate guinea pig for the Age of Disney. What success Marvel has had at the box office Lucasfilm now seeks to reproduce with both a sequel trilogy and no doubt several standalone films, and with more options for small-screen, lower-budget productions than ever before, it stands to reason that they’re watching Marvel’s television operations with great interest. Here are some things I think they should keep in mind. Read More

No Underwear in Space: Costume Design in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Posted on February 13, 2015by Feature Articles, Pen and Paper

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As an entire profession of costume designers would be more than happy to tell you, how you dress your characters is just as important as what you script them to say. In some ways, perhaps even more important. There’s even an Academy Award for it (which A New Hope won in 1977, among numerous other accolades – the only science fiction film ever so honored, to the best of my recollection). Movies, television, video games, and comics are all extremely visual mediums by nature: unlike a novel, you can’t just let your audience’s imagination fill in the blanks.

Every single detail, down the last button, has to be accounted for, all the more so if you’re dealing with a work of science fiction or fantasy. The more significant a role a character has, the more vital it is that you get their outfit just right. They’re your main selling point, after all: the face you’re going to plaster all over your comic covers, the costumes the stores are going to stock their shelves with come Halloween, the action figures that the children will clamor for when Christmas arrives. Get it wrong and, well, there’s a very good reason Zardoz didn’t become a franchise and comic book adaptations stopped using tights.

In the wonderful world of fiction, you truly are what you wear. Nobody simply has poor taste in clothes, not when they have an entire costume department responsible for painstakingly dressing them, and concept artists and designers behind them who were hired specifically to design clothes layered with meaning and symbolism. But this process is not always an easy one, for when you’re dealing with a setting as far removed from our own time and place as Star Wars, the wardrobe department will find themselves facing an entirely new and unusual set of challenges.

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Everything Disney Needs to Know, It Can Learn from Young Jedi Knights

Posted on February 11, 2015by The Holocron

HeirsoftheForceDisney has a new generation in its hands. The youngest generation of Star Wars fans, brought in by The Clone Wars and Rebels and now the sequels, will be growing up with new heroes. There are definitely some Star Wars fans now who were introduced to the GFFA with Clone Wars, identified a lot with Ahsoka and her age. The equivalent, for many of us who were big EU fans as children, ran into a group of younger characters varied enough that all of us could identify with at least one of them. They were closely connected to the familiar characters of Star Wars, and made their own stories within the GFFA. As a series and for what it did for the SW universe, it would be worth it for Disney to learn from the Young Jedi Knights series.

Young Jedi Knights was a young-reader series devoted to the adventures of Jacen, Jaina, and their friends in the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV. It brought in the cast who later would become the Jedi of the New Jedi Order, gave the next generation of Solos a lot of life, and continued Star wars adventures for a younger crowd. Even though YJK was written for a teen audience, it still handled similar plot material to the rest of Star Wars, and retained the feeling of the universe, set up new characters, and gave a good jumping-off point for further adventures without feeling too much like a kids’ book.

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Meet the Marvels: Kieron Gillen

Posted on February 9, 2015by

marvels-gillencoverWe continue with our look back at representative works penned by the new writers of the Marvel Star Wars comics. Last time we looked at Jason Aaron, and now we are going to take a look at Kieron Gillen, writer of this week’s Darth Vader. Given that he’s writing one of the largest villains in the history of fiction, we’ll take a look at one of his most villainous series: the critically-acclaimed Journey Into Mystery.

In 2011, Gillen was already a popular author and was slowly becoming one of Marvel’s staples. Coming from the world of media journalism, his New Games Journalism manifesto had tried to adapt the new journalism model to the world of video games. His first real comic, outside of comic strips for video game magazines, was called Phonogram, a delicious mish-mash of pop sorcery, britpop and true love for anything pop that he authored alongside long-time collaborator Jamie McKelvie and that turned him into someone to keep an eye on. After writing some one-shots for Marvel, he co-authored comic books with well-established writers like Warren Ellis or Matt Fraction and eventually took the reins of the Thor comic book for ten issues. After a long and well-received stint in Uncanny X-Men, Gillen returned to Thor, but to everyone’s surprise the book was renamed to Journey Into Mystery (the name of the comic where Thor and the Asgardians first appeared) and, well, stopped being a Thor comic. Read More

Just Because You Can…. Limitations and Epic Moments in Star Wars

Posted on February 6, 2015by Obiwomble's Outlook

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Well, that was fast. A preview of Marvel’s second Star Wars issue went online last week ahead of it coming out this past Wednesday. Said preview blew a big plot moment by showing Luke versus Vader, or more accurately, Luke getting his arse kicked by Vader, who was on Maximum Contempt setting. There’s only one problem with this and that’s that these two aren’t supposed to meet until Cloud City. If Vader and Luke and previously crossed paths it removes a whole lot of power from that scene, and for what? What’s the creative return here for having them meet earlier save that someone thought it ‘cool’? Luke and Vader is cool… but on Cloud City.

Marvel and Jason Aaron are operating on the same principle that Lucas applied to his last re-edit, just because they can, they will. No matter that they’ll take those epic moments of the films and rip them to pieces – an extra duel or ten that happens between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, that has no effect on Cloud City, does it? Of course it does. Much as adding a pointless NOOOO robs the Vader scene in Return of the Jedi of its emotional impact because it renders it too obvious. Read More