Category: Opinion

What Star Wars Can Learn From Marvel’s Secret Wars 2015

Posted on October 27, 2014by

Announced at the recent New York Comic Con, Secret Wars will be Marvel’s big 2015-16 event. Marvel have followed that up in over the last fortnight with a barrage of teasers for even more events for summer 2015. What does it all mean? For right now, two things are obvious: If you are on the inside of Marvel’s continuity and have been following it for a while, this will look like the most ambitious undertaking ever. If you are on the outside, having kicked the habit and stayed off the books in the main, it will look entirely incomprehensible!

So, what’s the problem with it? The problem with Secret Wars 2015 is it will be a line-wide event, now with an array of satellites, which appear to be specific to each group of titles, but also eras too. The problem is nothing gets to avoid it! The Ultimate books? It is going to cover those too! If you buy into the idea for the event, it sounds great, it sounds like something you want to read. If you do not buy into it? Too bad, you’re going to have to if you keep reading the books up to a certain point in 2015. That’s the problem. This is practically polarizing consumer interest into two directions – towards or away from Marvel’s entire line for a year or longer. (Plus, once you are out of touch with Marvel superheroes for that kind of duration, you may not hop back on-board.) Read More

Skyhoppers, Hovertrains, and Landspeeders

Posted on October 24, 2014by

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In Star Wars, even something as mundane as simply getting around is a visibly futuristic process. Cars are replaced with landspeeders that glide smoothly over even the roughest terrain without needing a single wheel to touch the nonexistent roads. Their governments must save a fortune on infrastructure upkeep. Skyhoppers and airspeeders are more like flying cars (or what flying cars would be like, if we had them) than planes, complete with being totaled by thrill-seeking young drivers.

A speeder bike is something like a motorcycle, only about a dozen times faster, with no wheels, and an even worse safety record when it comes to crashing headlong into inconvenient obstacles like trees. Crossing the great void between the stars to new worlds is as simple as booking passage on a vessel headed in the right direction, the galaxy’s denizens having long ago circumvented that troublesome little matter of the light barrier that’s been keeping us from our round trip to Alpha Centauri all these years.

With casual interstellar travel being so accessible to the general public, one can safely assume that travel time between cities or continents on the same world would be all but nonexistent in the vast majority of cases. War machines are regularly produced in bipedal and quadrupedal configurations and deployed to great effectiveness, despite the obvious limitations and weaknesses of the design. Clearly, someone has an extreme aversion to wheels and tank treads (to the disappointment of car chase enthusiasts everywhere).

It’s easy to dismiss these things as being nothing more than irrelevant bits of background information and lore; the means by which our heroes hop, skip, and jump between their interstellar adventures. Flavor for something that would be otherwise stale, of interest only to the most overzealous of pedants. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

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How I Spent My Fall Break: NYCC 2014

Posted on October 17, 2014by

151,000 people, four days, one large convention center, altogether too many overpriced snacks, nowhere near enough hours of sleep. That’s quite a convention experience. It was my third year attending NYCC, and this year, I wasn’t just there for fun and mischief. Being at the con as Eleven Thirty-Eight’s woman on the street was an experience, and I come bearing tales of what Star Wars has in store.

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In all honesty, last year I saw a good deal more Star Wars cosplay. This year it was a bit scarce, though I did run into a Mara Jade, quite a few Mandalorians, a few Sabines, a Tahiri, and several different versions of Leia, Anakin Skywalker, and Darth Vader. The Rebel Legion and 501st definitely had less presence than last year, but there were a few around. As a whole, cosplay was not what stood out the most about Star Wars fandom. Instead, the very presence of the fandom was powerful enough.

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The Anatomy of a Spoiler

Posted on October 13, 2014by

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Well, it took a good long time, but after more than a year of gleefully picking apart the rumors coming out around Episode VII, I finally had to make a judgment call. A couple weeks ago, Making Star Wars ran a spy report detailed what they claimed was the film’s “I am your father” moment. I’m not linking directly to it, but it should be easy enough to track down if you desire. As I’ve explained before, my standard operating procedure is to immediately assume all rumors are bullshit, simply because of the thousand mitigating factors between what someone says online and what’s actually going to appear in the finished film fourteen months from now. Even if you assume the rumor reports are coming from people who genuinely believe them, there are just too many variables in play to hang your hat on anything not released officially by Lucasfilm (or, in other words, pretty much anything at all).

But the whole “I am your father” thing gave me pause. Despite not seeing the Star Wars films as a child, one of the exceedingly few things I knew before I finally did see them—and to put this in perspective, I can distinctly remember a time when I thought Harrison Ford played Luke Skywalker—was that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. It’s almost impossible to exist in modern western society and not know that, even if you don’t have an iota of context for that information. Read More

The Case for The Common Man

Posted on October 10, 2014by Guest Editorials

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The future of Star Wars is currently a place of vast creative possibilities and storytelling opportunities. To make the most of this new era those who chart the course of the franchise through this undiscovered country must remember the importance of ordinary characters. They form an integral part of Star Wars’ past but can also become an important part of its future.

Enjoyable as the pre-reboot Expanded Universe was, it’s clear to see that in its final days it had become a “Jedi only” club. A place where ordinary characters were pushed to the periphery in favour of Force-sensitive antagonists. Indeed in some cases those without Force powers were seen as utterly incapable of facing let alone defeating the threats being faced by their midi-chlorian-endowed comrades. Now can be the time to change all that and show that ordinary characters can be not only as compelling but as capable in a fight as any Jedi. To see an example of this done well we need only look back to an earlier time in the EU, and to the character of Jagged Fel. Read More