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

Posted on November 16, 2015by

swrm-slavers2

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

Rebels Revisited: Congratulations, Captain Hera

Posted on November 13, 2015by

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One thing that we’ve known about Hera right from the get-go is that she is a fantastic pilot. She’s taken the Ghost to some places that should be utterly impossible to go, and saved the lives of her crew a dozen times. We’ve also seen that she’s a compassionate leader, a true team mother, wholly devoted to the welfare of those with her and around her. She can wrangle even the most extreme of loners and rally them to a cause: the cause of freedom and justice.

As captain of the Ghost, she’s served in both capacities for the first season and now into the second. But as Rebels has evolved and the scope of the story expanded, the status quo has been shaken numerous times and in several ways. But the most realistic thing is how actions and choices made have had consequences that are both good and bad. The Grand Inquisitor was killed, but that caused two new Inquisitors to take a great interest in hunting down those responsible. The Spectres were chased off of Lothal by Darth Vader, but they joined up with a larger, more formal rebel task force shortly thereafter. What “Wings of the Master” did was present an opportunity for the status quo of the show’s most steady character to be shaken up in a way that may not necessarily be either one. 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

The Growth of Ezra Bridger – “You truly are a Jedi”

Posted on November 6, 2015by Feature Articles

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The underworld of Star Wars is a lively place, full of colorful characters and the sort of imaginative creatures that fully exemplify what a galaxy far far away might look like. From the moment we step into the cantina in Mos Eisley and see creatures talking, laughing, drinking and playing music, it’s been a part of the franchise’s DNA. What sort of characters exist beyond the edge of the galactic spotlight, where the shadows are thickest and the promise of adventure, debauchery and profit are strongest?

In Rebels, the underworld has hitherto been represented by Vizago and Azmorigan, two crime lords with differing methods but similar goals. Vizago is subtle, willing to play any and every side in order to gain himself the largest profits. Azmorigan is more bombastic and demanding, but no less unscrupulous, demanding what he sees as his and willing to kill to get it (and to avoid having to pay for it). Of course, we could bring up Lando, but he is more of a business person who happens to deal with unsavory sorts.

Added to the list this season is Hondo Ohnaka. Enthusiastic about everything and frightened of nothing, Hondo fit right into the underworld of the Clone Wars era he was introduced in, taunting Sith Lords and making “friends” with Jedi Masters. Hondo is a sort of idealized underworlder, not truly amoral, just selfish and out for profits. He has a sense of honor and a healthy respect for the Jedi, and his antics are far more fun and entertaining than menacing or sleazy. For all of the hard times that Hondo has fallen on without a ship or crew of his own, he still represents an interesting counterpoint to Vizago and Azmorigan, and delivers an intriguing offer to Ezra. Read More