What Star Wars Can Learn From IDW’s Transformers

Posted on April 22, 2015by

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Unlike Star Wars, there are numerous versions of Transformers and you don’t even have to factor in Michael Bay’s version! Marvel UK, Marvel US, Dreamwave, IDW – that’s four variants right there and there’s likely a few more still.

It is IDW’s reboot, started several years ago, with Simon Furman writing it, that has the most lessons to impart to Star Wars, if it but listens.

Furman’s arc re-imagined Transformers, with a multi-front galactic war being fought between the Autobots and Decepticons. No longer were they limited to Earth, no longer was it all set on one planet – though Earth did become a significant resource due to Shockwave’s age-old plotting. In this new structure both Megatron and Optimus Prime were generals, marshalling troops and resources on a galactic scale. Thus, when both take a hand in events on Earth, it is indeed A Big Deal™. Read More

In Defense of Anarchy: What I Saw on Thursday

Posted on April 20, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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As I’ve probably mentioned before, I don’t really follow The Force Awakens spoilers. I recognize that in this line of work it’s inevitable that certain things will get around to me, and some have, but by and large I don’t know if what I’m going to talk about in this piece is already confirmed, debunked, or neither—these are just my impressions, as an educated guesser who’s seen more than his share of Star Wars stories. When the new teaser was revealed last Thursday, a lot of stuff was pretty much what you’d expect—X-wing pilots in orange, TIEs chasing the Millennium Falcon, a masked villain with a red lightsaber.

But if you looked closely, not everything was so easy to contextualize—especially one shot of stormtroopers fighting against a rogue TIE fighter in some sort of hangar, immediately following a distraught-looking Finn removing his own helmet. If there’s one plot point we can safely rely on at this stage, it’s that John Boyega’s stormtrooper character defects or deserts early on. The stormtroopers in the original trilogy were nothing if not anonymous and interchangeable, so choosing to begin the story of the sequel trilogy with the face of the Empire going AWOL is an effective way to demonstrate that things aren’t quite as clear-cut now as they were with Palpatine in charge. Read More

Portrait of a Disgruntled Fan

Posted on April 17, 2015by Interviews

roguelogoNow that Celebration Anaheim is underway and some portion of our audience will be reading this on their phones surrounded by other Star Wars fans, I thought it would be a good time to begin a new recurring interview feature whose title I’m shamelessly ripping off from Stephen Colbert, Better Know a Fan. While I pride myself on this site featuring a healthy range of opinions among its regular staff, I occasionally come across people whose perspectives are interesting to me but not necessarily in an editorial context—this will be my vehicle to offer those people a moment at the microphone. If you’re familiar with the Literature boards at the Jedi Council Forums, my first subject will be very familiar to you—in only a few years of posting, he’s become a fixture there, and while we may not always agree with him, we all know exactly where he stands.

Zachary Skaggs, known at the JCs as Zeta1127, could be listed in the dictionary under the word “consistent”. Despite being relatively new to the online community, he makes no bones about his view that Star Wars’ glory days are well behind it, thanks to the editorial direction of the last several years of “Big Three” novels and now the continuity shakeups of The Clone Wars and the sequel trilogy. While normally I’m content to keep incessant fan negativity at arm’s length, especially here, Zachary isn’t your typical complainer. As, frankly, unreasonable as his views of Lucasfilm can be, the man doesn’t have a trollish bone in his body—no matter how much some of us roll our eyes or even outright tease him for being such a downer, he takes it all in good humor and never gets petty or personal, which in my view warrants respect. I wanted to find out what makes him tick, and he was gracious enough to oblige me. Read More

Hyperlane to the Danger Zone: Essential Elements for a Rogue Squadron Movie

Posted on April 15, 2015by

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We don’t really know very much about Rogue One right now. We have a title that may or may not mean something to us, the release date, and the names of one member of the cast (in an unspecified role), the director, the producers, the score composer, the source of the core concept, the person who named it, and the writer. Unless more should be revealed in the time between when I write this article and when it’s published, that’s just about it.

Anything apart from that is nothing more than pure speculation. So, in order for this article to actually contain meaningful content, we’re going to have to treat a certain assumptions as if they were fact: specifically, that the name Rogue One does refer in some way to Rogue Squadron, and that it is a movie focused on the exploits of that particular unit of starfighter pilots.

Now, it’s entirely possible that these assumptions will be proven false in the coming months, especially if one takes the initial report regarding the concept art for the film into account. It may turn out to be something more along the lines of Wraith Squadron, dealing with hybrid commando-pilots.

It may not be a movie about starfighter pilots at all. Even if that ends up being the case, I will have no cause to complain, but I will continue to maintain the viability of a feature film centered around starfighter pilots and their spacecraft. Today, we’re going to talk about what steps might be taken to ensure that Rogue One is the best space ace movie it can possibly be.

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Rebel in the Ranks – Among the Best Novels in the New Canon

Posted on April 13, 2015by

sote-ritrJason Fry’s second entry in the Servants of the Empire young adult novel series takes place concurrently with the Rebels season one episode “Breaking Ranks” and his two books arguably do more to develop Lothal as an interesting place than an entire season of the still-excellent show has managed to do. If you’re still worried about the “young adult” part of that sentence, read our review of the first book in the series and have all your concerns allayed. Fry’s second book in the series continues to provide adult-like depth to the setting explored in the television show, but it also works really well as a YA novel that we would have really liked to read when we were younger.

While the first book in the series introduced the characters and the setting, this book builds on it while changing the tone enough that it doesn’t read like just a follow-up story. The first book featured themes of colonialism and adolescent sports drama that related to each other in surprising ways. By Rebel in the Ranks, the main characters have moved on to different things and the style of the storytelling changes accordingly. Yes, there are two main point of view characters now: Zare Leonis returns as a newly-minted cadet at Lothal’s Imperial Academy, while Merei Spanjaf’s role expands as we see her various undercover attempts to help Zare find out about his sister’s fate. The two characters’ different narrative arcs – and the contrast with the themes explored in the first novel – constitute the true meat of the novel, though part of the novel also overlaps with the story of “Breaking Ranks.”

Though we’re not a huge fan of novelizing television show episodes, Fry does it pretty well: the story of the novel does not play second-fiddle to the television episode, and actually serves to make the action in the episode seem a lot more interesting. As we said in our previous review, the Servants of the Empire books should be essential reading for any fan of the Rebels television show. We can now add an additional recommendation: it’s good reading for any young Star Wars fan not only because the readers might identify with the characters, but also because the audience might learn to relate to people they’ve never identified with before. It’s a book about camaraderie and teamwork, and those themes carry through from the book’s dedication to the very end. Merei Spanjaf, in particular, is a great female role model and Disney should pay attention to her!

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