Category: Simple Tricks

A New Dawn: The Staff Reacts

Posted on September 12, 2014by , , and

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When a book is as hotly anticipated as A New Dawn, just one review might not be good enough. Several of us at Eleven-ThirtyEight were able to make our way through it over the last couple weeks, and in order to give everyone a chance to speak their mind, myself, Ben Wahrman, Jay Shah, and Rocky Blonshine got together last weekend for some informal Aggressive Negotiations.

It’s been a while, so if you’re unfamiliar with this series, all you need to know is that it’s basically a low-key chat session with only loose moderation, and no holds barred—no censorship, no editing, no typo repair. Enjoy!

 

 

Mike: Let’s start with general impressions of the book itself. Was it pretty much what everyone was hoping for?

Ben: pretty much, yeah

Rocky: even better.

Ben: i loved Kenobi, and this was about on that level, but different

Mike: i’m not as over-the-moon about it as i was Kenobi, but it was definitely classic JJM

Jay: More or less. I wanted confirmation that EU would still be used, especially background information. And I was hoping that it would make the characters from Rebels seem interesting.

Rocky: I was so scared that this book wouldn’t feel like the EU we know and love, but it had a lot of the feel of classic EU stuff. Read More

Rebels Revisited: Prequel Shorts

Posted on September 5, 2014by and Feature Articles

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With just under a month to go until the official premiere of Star Wars Rebels‘ first two episodes, the franchise’s hyperdrive is pretty much locked in—the first tie-in novel is out, the merch is starting to appear on shelves, there’s some kind of weird bag thing happening at Subway, and as of last Monday, all four preview character shorts are available to the public (and below!). Brief vignettes taking place apart from the main action of the series, these four 3-minute videos serve as our introductions to the cast of Rebels in action, and even more importantly, to the show’s tone and style.

So now that they’re out, this seemed like a good opportunity to introduce our own walking, talking Rebels coverage machine—new staff writer and longtime contributor, Ben Wahrman. Ben has foolhardily (is that a word?) agreed to write a piece covering each episode of Rebels’ upcoming first season—since the premiere is two episodes, that’s fifteen pieces in total. Myself or others may weigh in here and there, but the plan is for Ben to be the backbone of Eleven-ThirtyEight’s Rebels operation. Read More

John Jackson Miller on A New Dawn, Elevators, and Being Awesome

Posted on September 1, 2014by Interviews

anewdawnbookIt’s Labor Day here in the states, but Jay Shah had a new interview with John Jackson Miller, author of tomorrow’s new dawn in Star Wars publishing conveniently titled A New Dawn, hot off the presses—and with no regularly-scheduled posts on Tuesdays, I thought it’d be more prudent to let ‘er rip. And don’t miss Jay’s reaction to A New Dawn from a couple weeks ago..

Enjoy! – Mike Cooper, EIC

 

 

Eleven-ThirtyEight: How did writing A New Dawn differ from writing the Knights of the Old Republic comics? Aside from the differences in medium between novels and comic books, were there different challenges in writing a story about an upcoming product as opposed to a preëxisting story?

John Jackson Miller: With the KOTOR comics, colliding with new things that were planned in other media wasn’t that much of a problem: KOTOR I and II were already out, and the only real thing I was seeking to avoid was giving away the secret behind the start of the Mandalorian Wars. (I didn’t know what that was being saved for, but it eventually came up in the REVAN novel.) The challenge instead there was making sure that my stories synched up with the backstory developed in the games — and that was often quite daunting, as there was no clearing-house that had the entire script from every possible conversation you could have in the game. There were a couple of times were I had to adapt to lines of dialogue I simply hadn’t seen. Read More

The Dark Horses of Dark Horse Comics

Posted on August 29, 2014by and Feature Articles

xwrs-wedgeSome of my earliest memories of Star Wars fandom are of searching my local comic book store for trade paperbacks of X-Wing: Rogue Squadron. Huge book stores were still in vogue back in the nineties, so odds were good that the only thing between me and whichever novel I’d decided to read next for my Great Bantam Catch-Up of ’97-’99 was a quick trip to Media Play or Borders. Catching up on the comics was another matter—something “mainstream” like Dark Empire wasn’t too hard to track down, but there were at least six trade collections of XWRS already in print by the time I got around to it, and a couple more on the way—and that’s not counting the first story arc, The Rebel Opposition, which wasn’t collected until the first XWRS Omnibus several years later.

For sixteen-year-old me, just figuring out which TPB came next was something of a challenge; actually finding the damned thing in tiny little Seeley & Kane’s a couple blocks from my house was far more uncertain. I eventually managed, of course, but if those trades hadn’t been out there, I’d have stood virtually no chance of finding the original issues, meaning I wouldn’t have had another shot at reading the series until the aforementioned Omnibus set much, much later.

All this is to say that it’s incredibly heartening to see the announcement this week of Marvel’s first Star Wars “Epic Collection” TPB, including much of Dark Horse’s post-Revenge of the Sith material, some of which is less than a couple years old. Regardless of the Legends banner on the front, Dark Horse’s Star Wars catalog includes some of—no, many of—the best SW stories ever told, and I’m thrilled to know that the comics license changing hands doesn’t mean new generations of fans will lose access to that material; at least not all of it. Read More

Sacred Shaaks – Eleven-ThirtyEight Goes Negative

Posted on August 8, 2014by , , , and Not A Committee

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Despite all the hay I’ve made over wanting this site to be a source of positivity, I belong to the school of thought that says if you’re not making anyone angry, you’re doing something wrong. Between my natural contrarianism and a nagging aversion to treading the same ground as every other fan blog under the suns, now and then I’ll go out of my way to highlight a point of view purely because I don’t hear it very often. Even if I don’t personally agree with something, if I feel like there’s a fair point to be made that’s being denied a seat at the table due to nothing more than aggressive common consensus, I consider it our responsibility as a soapbox to expand that conversation rather than condense it.

While that philosophy has poked its head out at least a handful of times already, its most blatant expression on this site is one I haven’t really addressed overtly before—the phrase “no sacred shaaks” in our tagline up top. Totally aside from whatever my actual opinions are, nothing gets my back up more than a reasonable person being shouted down because their opinion is unpopular. One of the things I love about Star Wars is that it can be interpreted in so many different ways; nothing about it is wholly good or wholly bad, and to orthodoxically condemn or defend any one element is to reduce it by definition—but ask some fans and you’d never know it. Read More