Comics Darth Vader Annual #2

It mostly lined up prior to the 2014 reboot as well. When the Story Group was announced they were supposed to be better than what was before.

 

It's not necessary to bend over backwards to retcon stuff if you just do a little fact checking before publishing. Fact checking has NEVER been as easy as it is today, what with the official Holocron, Wookieepedia, book reviews...

 

Were these mistakes important to the story, or something? Actual changes, rather than errors?

 

I also note Disney said they would be far more integrated and careful about continuity.

 

Same people are still pretty much the ones still in charge.
So not really a surprise imo.

 

This not holding creators to account led to the eventual unraveling of the old continuity....the first symptom being the intentional...not unintentional blunder mind you...but intentional reinterpretation of Spar in Karin Traviss' works from original portrayal in a Star Wars Insider article that she helped co write. There was some outcry then but also the same " well fuzzy window" arguments as well.

Eventually it just snow balled. I still believe that you get Even Piell level events because the first "shrugging of shoulders" by the fans at something tells the creators they can get away with ignoring continuity and no one will say anything.

I think is this is because fans feel this strange thing called optimism...that people can use some hypothetical construct called common sense? Balance?

But the history of the EU already proves that LFL cannot be trusted with this hypothetical power.

This comic has more than just issues with Lyra. Tarkin and Vader's relationship doesn't seem to jive very well with other stories portraying the two. The way Tarkin speaks to Vader in this issue doesn't even even jive with the recent issue of Vader in which he attempts to kill Vader. Tarkin talks to Vader with more respect in a situation in which he's trying to kill the man.

Also,I felt that RO establishing that it was the first time Krennic had met Vader was supposed to establish the enormity of the Empire and the fact that even someone like Krennic had never met the two top dogs in the Empire. Also, IIRC Vader was supposed to be more of a hidden figure in this canon version of the Empire according to story group. Looks like that will be going by the wayside.

On a non continuity related issue, I just looked through the comic again and I just can't believe how all subtly in Tarkin's characterization is gone. All the dark charm and humorous nuances are gone(except maybe the part where he says to Vader, " Dare I ask how you dealth with them?") . When Tarkin approaches the officer on Scariff he tells the man "Silence." That's a Vader-esque line. Direct and to the point. It didn't feel very Tarkin. Granted he's angry but every other scene didn't feel very Tarkin.

Or maybe it's too Tarkin-y because the Emperor just says, "here, take my boy". First of all what? Don't buy that.

Second, the best Tarkin comes out when he's trying to navigate the power structure of Vader and the Emperor. Him being in charge just makes him kinda boring.

Also, again, I don't buy the Emperor giving Tarkin full authority over Vader. If that did happen it would be worth more than a few lines of dialogue.

That kind of event was the entire focus of the first Vader series, a series which implied that Vader himself had more power before his fall from grace.

 

Well Palpatine did give Tagge full control over Vader.

And Vader repaid him quickly.

 

Also by committing traitorous acts. Which I didn't mind because they were relatively minor. Also, I thought it was supposed to be the first time Vader had done such things.

Fine if he didn't. But essentially contributing long term to the Rebels destroying the Death Star....way too much.

 

Exactly. Which begs the question, what is the point of the SG if they aren't different? Can they be different, or is it simply inevitable to have continuity errors, as proven in both Legends and canon? Maybe the announcement of the SG a few years back was just a sort of marketing trick to tell the fans "it will be better now, buy our stuff". I don't blame the people in the SG for these errors, as I don't blame the LFL licensing group or whatever it was called back in the day. I'm sure they did and are doing their best, but I guess it's impossible to keep track of everything in something as massive as Star Wars.

 

Is it impossible to keep track of everything in something as massive as Star Wars? Probably. But in this case, surely it's not that difficult to make a one shot comic fit with one novel?

 

The new Star Wars is not that massive yet.

Other franchises have done it successfully in the past...Babylon 5 comes to mind.

IDW's tranformers had a ridiculous amount of continuity issues when it first started and John Barber made it a mission to clean them all up. Tiny continuity issues became entire storylines. Really cool ones in some cases.

IDW TMNT is another series that sets things up and remains consistent. All of those universes are currently larger than the current canon incarnation of Star Wars.

 

Except for how 08 TCW retconned most of the Dark Horse comics... That was the big one.
Force Unleashed 1 and 2 canon is dubious at best.
Thrawn trilogy made the Clone Wars out to be a war against the Clones. (Ok easy shot I know)
The Marvel comics of old are kinda dubious.

 

You'll find the answers to those questions in the original press release that announced the reboot and the formation of the Story Group.

Not much being said there about "preventing continuity errors." Yes, they are inevitable.

Here's the better question: when is a continuity error not a continuity error? Ulicus made an interesting point over in the Rogue One thread a couple years ago about how Star Wars in the Story Group era has transitioned from the "magic window" model to the "based on a true story" model. That is, if we pretend that some version of the events of Star Wars "actually happened," then what we are reading and watching are adaptations of those events - with the corresponding embellishments, errors in translation, etc. That's not optimal for folks who relish strict continuity and want everything to line up just so, but it grants storytellers a greater degree of freedom and that's not bad.

I think we're looking at an example of the "based on a true story" principle here - there's no way that neither Chuck Wendig nor Story Group simply didn't notice the fact that the stories conflict with each other. The Vader annual represents a different version of the events involving Lyra on Alpinn. That thinking is going to be pretty hard for a lot of fans to adjust to, I think, because Star Wars fans (myself included) love pretending this is all a big, consistent universe. But if it seems like that's the direction things are going, maybe it behooves us to adjust as well.

 

I haven't read Catalyst (It's literally on a shelf) but I take it the problem is Lyra gets information on the Death Star from a self-destructing droid and gets up and runs Annual and in Catalyst she gets the information from somewhere else and then has a going away party? What, the gal can't go for a jog, have independent confirmation from another source and then have a party?

 

One Canon Guru @Sinrebirth we require your treasured guidance, once more.

 

The "worst" problem in my mind is how this comic retcons Lyra into an unwitting pawn of Vader.

 

True, TCW was the "breaker" (for a lack of a better term) of the old canon. TFU 1 and 2 work, but they make the timeline convoluted. However, I think TFU makes more sense than TCW - it's easier to imagine Vader having an apprentice during the 16 year time gap in the dark times, rather than the 'just out of his teens' Anakin in the span of what, not even 2 years during a super busy war period?

I largely agree with your post, but I still go back to my question - how is the present Story Group doing something significantly different or better than the Lucas Licensing Group (or whatever it was called) back in the day? Inconsistencies that were manageable with small retcons or explanations in subsequently published guide books were common in (what is now) Legends. If the same kinds of "errors" (again, for a lack of a better term) are being done in the new canon with the Story Group (a more formally established group than anything before), then what's the point? Why form a story group, introduce it to the fans as something better and more focused than its predecessors if it's going to function exactly like the older group(s)?

 

Respectfully, I think you're still trying to define Story Group as "the people who prevent inconsistencies" and I don't think they or Lucasfilm would agree with that definition. They "oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development." How is that different than what came before? Well, here's one way it's absolutely different: the word all. Under Lucas, Lucasfilm operated under the "my universe / their universe" principle. Lucas's universe made no effort to coordinate with "their universe" and thus you had the whole Even Piell thing, among others. That alone - the fact that the films and TV material, the stuff that used to be "my universe," now coordinates as good as it does with "their universe" - that's new, and very different than how they used to do it.

 

That's a fair explanation.

A hypothetical question - will this coordination prevent some director in the future to make a movie that would potentially contradict an older canon novel (for example)? Imagine that this hypothetical movie pitch is objectively very good, and it is sure to be extremely profitable. However, should this hypothetical movie be filmed, an important novel from a decade prior would inevitabily be contradicted - no ammount of retcons or coordination would suffice to reasonabily keep both stories within the same shared universe. In this scenario, would LFL reject the movie pitch just to preserve continuity, or accept it, but at the cost of at least partially rebooting the EU?

 

I think another thing the Story Group has done well is coordinate the overall thematics of the Story of Star Wars (Mostly in film mind you) really well.

Look at Rogue One to Last Jedi: The Themes of Hope pop up over and over again, that was started from Rogue One.

Certain ways young Han Solo acts you could link to how Kylo does but in a dark contexts.

I'm sure I'm missing something but i think that's another part of the Story Groups job.

 

I agree. Vader #18 was a total contrast of Annual #2 issue regarding the Tarkin-Vader relationship, and it went the route of Tarkin being a slimey politic stereotype. In the EU, you got either a dangerous genius Tarkin, or a bureaucratic ladder climber. Plus, I don't know what the timelines are, but evidently, the Tarkin-Vader hunt took place after the novel Tarkin.

Evidently, the Carrion Spike is still in order all the way up to the events of Annual #2, as far as I know, Bast could've been referring to the vessel when Tarkin made the famous "Evacuate in our moment of triumph?" quote.

So, how many years took place between #18 and the Annual. Tarkin, the novel, took place 5 years after the Clone Wars, and I've read Catalyst, but I can't pin a date around Lyra's investigation on Apinn in this timeframe - maybe 10 years after ROTS? If 5 years passed, maybe Vader and Tarkin had a dispute - perhaps it will be elaborated within Thrawn Alliances, which I doubt because based on an excerpt from Thrawn Alliances, it takes place after Thrawn's failure to round up the rebels on Lothal (2-3 years before R1 and ANH).

Evidently, some of the writers have open interpretations of Tarkin and his character, but it waxes and wanes between cunning Sith killing outlander to manipulative and petulant politician. Maybe over the years, Tarkin is done with the Sith rulership and sees a huge opportunity to seize the Empire for himself, and who knows what is being done with the Tarkin Initiative, which seems to grow into a Hydra-like program under a Nazi regime.

Maybe I'm interpreting the issue differently, perhaps Tarkin has become emboldened by his position of authority, and the Emperor says he needs Tarkin. Maybe, that is something that should be explored...what's going on with the Tarkin Initiative, and why does the Emperor really need him? Vader is obviously jealous of the Death Star, and Tarkin sees the force and kyber crystals from a scientific standpoint, as an energy source. What motivated Vader to barge into Scariff?

 

There's a TV trope about that.

Depending on the Writer

 

Things are sort of blocked off into chunks for each medium, Marvel's Star Wars traffics a lot in the post ANH period, the novels are prequel setup or immediate fallout of the films, the movies and TV shows do broad strokes worldbuliding. Sure, Aftermath and Darth Vader/Star Wars comics have big important things happening in them but they're defined by what already happened in the movies and are filling in gaps. Basically, there doesn't seem to be any movies or TV shows that can flatten any of the novels or comics worldbuilding yet due to the scale and timeline placement of the stories.

The only thing I can think of would be something like JJ Abrams doing a scene or starting Episode IX immediately when Last Jedi ended which would contradict the current arc in Poe Dameron but that seems really, really unlikely.

 

This is sorta getting into canon then the Darth Vader annual but......I do feel there is a bit of unspoken heirachacy on what mediums will go over the important details.

And that would be

Movies
T.V
Books
Comics
Other......