Lit Star Wars Super Graphic

Searched back a bit on the forum, and didn't see a thread for this book at all, so thought I'd make one, not that I have a whole lot to say.

I hadn't heard of this before it got mentioned in the Wookieepedia thread here, and when I was at my local B&N today they had a few copies, so I flipped through it. It's a pretty strange book. It's essentially halfway between a reference book and a standard movie trivia book.

An example of its range: it describes whether the camera pans up or down for the end of each movie's opening scrawl; who says "I have a bad feeling about this" in each movie; which percentage of dialogue for each movie is dominated by which character; every question Luke asks in the movies; which characters get their limbs cut off in each movie.

But there's also stuff that's more useful, or at least interesting from an in-universe viewpoint: the ratio of machine to organic parts for Vader, Vidian, Grievous, Luke, and Lobot; the colors of every character's lightsabers; a (simplified) map of the galaxy; the relative diameters of a number of major planets*; seating charts for the Jedi Council divided by movies and TCW seasons.

I also noticed a ton of old EU stuff in it, in particular the different Jedi Councils and the various droid specialization degrees. Not sure if all of that has been re-canonized, but a glance at Wookieepedia indicates at least some of the stuff in it was new to the new canon (the Jedi Service Corps, for example).

Anyways, like I said, I just flipped through it in the store, but if anyone has a copy, I'd be interested to hear if there's anything of note it mentions.

*I happened to notice that it establishes Ilum as having a diameter of 660 km, the same as Starkiller Base.

 

Very interesting. There's some statistics I've been dying for, particularly Stormtrooper demographics. i.e.
1) Male to female.
2) Clone to non-clone.
3) Kamino clone to non-kamino clone.
4) (We'll probably never get Legacy information, but...) Human to Alien.

 

All that actually does sound pretty interesting, even the bizarre stuff. Did you get a sense of whether that Tholme pic was a special case, or are there potentially a lot of minor canon characters about to get their sole "pictures" from this?

 

I'm actually really interested in the human to alien ratio. The Empire is very human centred, but we know from SCAR Squad 99 and Thrawn that some Aliens are actually serving the Empire willingly. Be great to know how widespread that actually is. Be even better to have it broken down by galactic region.

 

I know it's a wild guess, but with the decentralized nature of the Imperial Military, it's not unreasonable to assume some sectors might allow aliens in their respective forces.

 

Potentially there could be more. (I did see Vidian, and he looks like Iron Man's helmet, basically.) There are a huge number of characters covered by various charts - at least three or four pages I saw (like the lightsaber one) are just a couple dozen portraits in that style.

There's also a page with a roster of the Rebel pilots at the Battle of Yavin by squadron, and most of them are just blank. Red Squadron seems like it might be a lot bigger than it was in the old EU (though I admit I don't remember the details) albeit with not many of the pilots being actually identified.

 

Flipped through this a bit more since I was in the vicinity of the local B&N again this morning. A few more observations:

There's a two-page spread detailing a chart of every Jedi/Sith and their master/apprentice and who killed who. This is the section where the Tholme pic came from. Amusingly, there is also a pic representing Plagueis, but it's simply a blank oval. Surprised that's not on Wookieepedia now, too.

There's also a two-page spread breaking down Rey's Force vision in TFA, including what and who she's she's seeing, who the voices she's hearing are and what it is they're saying, and which movies their dialogue is taken from (where it's not original). The only bit of new information in it, at least that stuck out to me, was that the guy she sees getting stabbed by Kylo Ren is a "warrior" and the rest of the corpses are that warrior's "clan." But it was still good to finally see an actual breakdown of all that information of that scene.

Similarly, there's a full chart depicting every Clone Wars episode organized both chronologically by when their aired, but also chronologically in terms of their in-universe order. I don't know if that's been formally established or not, but seems like a useful thing to look over.

There's a rather minimalist illustration and description of a stormtrooper's utility belt and what all the little canisters are.

From what I saw, the vast majority of the book's focus is on the movies, TCW, and Rebels, but there are at least a few references to Dark Disciple, Son of Dathomir, A New Dawn, Lost Stars, and the C-3PO one-shot comic.

 

I'm not too sure about the canonicity of this book. There've other books like this out of Egmont that Pablo had never heard of and were filled with Legends info and straight-up errors. Like calling Chopper a "C1-series protocol droid", if I recall correctly. Then again, I think this is the first of these available in the US.

 

I miss proper reference books.

 

I heard they asked Chris Trevas and Brian Rood to do the art, but they said something along the lines of "not doing another 500 ****ing character portraits".

 

Pretty sure it's canon. SW.com did a whole write up on it and an interview with the author. I'd say it's probably more legitimate than the examples you're thinking of if SW.com would get involved in covering the book.