Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
If you weren’t already sold on the brand new Star Wars: Legacy comic, you almost definitely will be after this issue. Legacy #5 by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman is out in stores today and draws the first story arc to a spectacular close. If you haven’t been reading the book thus far, I would definitely suggest find yourself copies of the first 5 issues or preordering the trade.
As with before, this review contains mild spoilers for the issue.
Are you going to be at Dragon Con this year? If you are, you can catch Brian and Nanci on a trio of panels on the Star Wars fan track.
The dates and times above are subject to change, but these are definitely the panels that you can find us on. It’ll be like the podcast! Except in front of a live audience. What could go wrong?
Awhile back, I wrote a post on EUCantina about the prequelization of the post-Return of the Jedi era of the Expanded Universe. The article’s basic point was that in the early days of the EU, the authors had no official knowledge about the Jedi Order in the Old Republic. None of us did–all we had was our imaginations. We didn’t know that Jedi lived in a Temple on Coruscant, were taken from their families as babies, and trained from the time they were children. As such, Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy was full of adults from many different worlds, of different ages, and varying careers. Some of them even came from families of Jedi. Tionne was a historian, Corran was a pilot and a cop, Mara was a smuggler, Kirana Ti was a warrior, Streen was a hermit, etc. etc. No matter what your opinion of the Jedi Academy Trilogy, I have to give credit to Kevin J. Anderson for creating a diverse group of Jedi, personality and background wise (although in retrospect there could have been more non-humans and people of color). Even in other eras, like the Tales of the Jedi comics, being a Jedi seemed to be more “what you did” and less “who you were.”
Then the prequels came out, and everything changed.
Update: Lucasfilm responds, says “Yeah, no.” Original post below:
I guess it’s been too long since there was a bombshell of an Episode VII rumor, so here we go. Badass Digest suggests that J.J. Abrams wants out of the film.
Why is it that I keep hearing tons of rumors that JJ Abrams is on the verge of dropping out of Star Wars? This has been something I’ve heard for a while now, and from multiple insiders. I know that he didn’t want to shoot the movie in England and was overruled, but that happened a while ago. This weekend at Comic Con I continued to hear these whispers. No director for Trek 3 has been found yet – might Abrams end up coming back after all, leaving Star Wars to someone else?
Bryan Young over at Big Shiny Robot talked about why this doesn’t make much sense and I’m right there with him. I’m going with fan paranoia on this one and I just won’t put stock into this particular rumor until after Celebration Europe at the earliest.
Welcome back to another edition of Cosplay Monday where we find cool costumes around the internet and share them with you to make your morning better. This week, we’re featuring a costume of a brand new character that somehow managed to take the internet by storm when she was introduced at E3 the other week. We’re talking about, of course, the Wii Fit Trainer. Check out this costume made by HayleyElise over on deviantArt. Seriously though: how cool is this?
In completely and utterly unsurprising news, this year’s Hall H panels at San Diego Comic Con were the hot spot for all the film news. Plenty of new trailers and clips were shown but here are some of the highlights or at least some of the ones that we thought were awesome and mention-worthy:
Picture from @AgentsofSHIELD
We learned Monday that Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD has scored Bear McCreary of Battlestar Galactica to compose the music for the upcoming show but that doesn’t mean that they had nothing left to share during today’s panel at San Diego Comic Con.
Producer Jeph Loeb, Executive Producers and Writers Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tanchareon, and Jeffrey Bell, were all in attendance as were actors Elizabeth Henstridge, Iain De Caestecker, Brett Dalton, Ming-Na, and Clark Gregg, all led by, of course, Joss Whedon.
Marc Storm and Ryan Penagos liveblogged the entire panel which you can read here. Highlights from the panel are beneath the cut in case of spoilers!
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post for EUCantina in which I analyzed the roles of women in the Expanded Universe, specifically in the post-Return of the Jedi era. The article was inspired by the cancellation of “Mandorla”, the Alex Irvine novel about Nomi Sunrider, from the Tales of the Jedi comics. I’d been wanting a book about Nomi for awhile, and was really disappointed to see it cancelled. And the disappointment stung on more than just a level of “I was really looking forward to that book.”
And then my brain began to turn. As far as I can recall, “Mandorla” was the only novel in recent memory to be focused on a female protagonist. We’ve had “Han” novels, “Bane” novels, “Revan” novels; where are the “Jaina” and “Padme” and “Leia” novels? Why cancel a novel that had a chance to expand on a strong female lead?
The article was generally well received, with a few exceptions, mostly from people claiming that the EU was already filled with lots of female characters. While that may have been true, the point of the article remained:
“But Star Wars has many female leads,” you might say. To which I reply: “but none are allowed to lead.”
The original article has since been lost to the internet ether, but I had my own draft copy elsewhere. With San Diego Comic Con happening and in anticipation of the Star Wars Books panel, I recently skimmed the article with the intention of reposting it here on Tosche Station for posterity’s sake. But as I kept reading, I realized something: in less than 18 months, Del Rey and LucasBooks has addressed nearly all of my major complaints in the article. And I knew I’d be remiss if I didn’t revisit the article and say THANK YOU.
*Commentary unavailable, Bria and Brian hyperventilating due to trailer induced awesome overload*
The intrepid James Floyd from Club Jade is at Comic Con this weekend, and he oh so generously livetweeted both SWEU panels.
From the Dark Horse panel, notable announcements included a new arc of Dark Times, the introduction of a new villain into Dawn of the Jedi, an Ewoks comic set in the arrival of the Empire era, Tom Taylor working on a secret project, and an upcoming Vader and clone story. For more, see Club Jade’s Storify feed from the event.
James also attended the Del Rey panel. Right at the beginning, moderator Leland Chee stated that the SWEU is in transition as a result of the Disney buyout and Episode VII. Therefore they’re unlikely to announce a new title…but we can dream, right?
Kenobi began as a graphic novel, but got so long it became a novel. Jen Heddle praised the novel, and John Jackson Miller compared Obi-Wan to a well-known superhero, saying he has to learn to be Clark Kent as opposed to Superman. Frank Parisi also praised the upcoming Empire and Rebellion: Razor’s Edge by Martha Wells, and Heddle added that there’s a good focus on the Big Three.
J.W. Rinzler, author of The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, said the book took two years to write and extensive digging into the archives. In a really cool feature, the enhanced e-book will have 30 minutes of audio and 30 minutes of video. Some clips were shown during the panel.
Other items of note:
Notable announcements include the cover reveal to Empire and Rebellion: Honor Among Thieves, the Han-centric novel by James S.A. Corey, published March 4, 2014. Heddle compared the novel to Brian Daley’s Han Solo Adventures.
A notable exception: no mention of Christie Golden’s Sword of the Jedi trilogy, scheduled for release next year. Is this good or bad news? We shall see…
Club Jade collected all of James’ tweets on another Storify, which you can find here. Thanks to James for his great reporting!