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Lit Coop's MARVELous Voyage

Discussion in 'Literature' started by CooperTFN, Feb 15, 2009.

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  1. Plaristes

    Plaristes Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 2, 2007
    Well, at least I'm consistent. [face_blush]
     
  2. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
    A Look Back at Marvel's Star Wars Comics by JohnJacksonMiller

    Right away I notice that Steve Leialoha (who I noted was helping Cynthia Martin near the end) and Tom Palmer were involved in this series pretty much from the beginning--Palmer inked the first cover and Leialoha inked issues 2-5.

    JJM specifically notes the non-canon covers for the movie adaptation issues, including #5's shot of the Death Star blasting away at the Yavin Base--which it suddenly occurs to me wasn't actually a non sequitur, but a super-early sneak peek of ANH Infinities! :D

    Marvel had licensed a bunch of SF titles in those days but Star Wars was its first success story.

    LFL actually went out of its way to insist that Jaxxon go away. At least until Gamer.

    Luke and Leia's respective swimming abilities between Marvel's Drexel story and Foster's SotME must have been the first intra-EU continuity error. They made it a whole year!

    In lieu of further comment on the Wheel arc, I'll just say =D= for Viva Space Vegas--great timing on that one.

    Huh, Jo Duffy wrote Silent Drifting? I can't remember if I realized that at the time.

    Now I wish I'd been paying attention to the letters columns earlier--JJM includes one gem from #24, wherein a reader laments that young lovers Luke and Leia are acting more like brother and sister. :oops:

    I'd forgotten how awesome Valance was. Definitely the highlight of the first forty issues.

    Heh, JJM calls Mosep the "Mark I" Jabba. :D

    Jesus, I'd forgotten about Silas Tagge's freeze ray. Go physics!

    Reading about the Tagge arcs again makes me wish they'd gotten around to reintroducing Domina in the Post-OT stories like they wanted to. It would've been interesting to see how the character evolved from 1980's sensibilities to 1985's--and in one big jump (not counting her appearance in #50), as opposed to the Big Three's gradual evolution.

    JJM notes that Riders in the Void was a last-second fill-in to accommodate a delay in the ESB adaptation. Funny how some of the best stuff can come from sudden replacements.

    Speaking of the good stuff, I'm disappointed that this article doesn't really seem to address the annuals. I would've liked to see JJM's take on The Long Hunt.

    More on the letters columns I missed--#25's was apparently one of the first places the title "The Empire Strikes Back" appeared in print.

    Al Williamson actually shared penciling duties on the ESB issues with Carlos Garzon, even "switching sometimes from panel to panel"; I hadn't even noticed a difference.

    Interesting that he notes some of the original drawings of Yoda were based on early concept art and changed in subsequent printings, because I was reading the recolored omnibus version and I still noticed that he looked off once or twice.

    "Several" stories in the period between ESB and RotJ were altered or rejected by LFL for straying too close to the movie resolutions. No wonder they stopped looking for Han for like a year.

    JJM has the temerity to call the Cody Sunn-Childe story "implausible". Well, I never! [face_shame_on_you]

    Oh, good, I'm not the only one who had trouble getting through #49.

    Sure enough, the Tarkin was originally going to be a second Death Star until LFL nixed it. That Marvel wanted to do it, I think, speaks volumes about the idea. [face_whistling]

    JJM diplomatically calls Last Gift from Alderaan a "John Carter of Mars-type story", while pointing out that it was the first time in four years that anyone had bothered to dwell on Leia's feelings about losing her entire planet.

    Apparently lots of people complained about Leia's seemingly romantic interaction with What's-His-Face in that story, despite the fact that he's married to Boob Cup Lady and Leia's clearly not interested.

    The first Hoojib issue was adapted as a children's record story. Cool, but what's a record?

    Understandably, JJM points out that when IG-88, Bossk, and Dengar showed up around the Stenax issues, they likely reminded people more of their action figures than of their one scene in ESB three years earlier.

    Y'know, one thing about Dani--would it have been so bad for her and Luke to have had a fling? I'm hardly a shipper where that's concerned, but when you think about all the white chicks Luke was happy to have thrown his way in those days, it's kind of annoying that Dani was the only flame he turned down. Clearly Cade knows something that he didn't.

    The Dancing Goddess story in #79 was a nod to the Indiana Jones movies; didn't think of that.

    The Lahsbee/Ewok similarity was another Tarkin-like coincidence--except LFL actually allowed them with only minor physical changes to distinguish the two.

    JJM sheds a little more light on the confusion surrounding the publishing of the RotJ adaptation:
    How prescient--JJM's title for the first set of issues Post-RotJ is "Disney World?"

    One interesting thing to note is that Lucasfilm specifically didn't want the Empire around after RotJ--and actually, barely seemed interested in continuing the series at all. It kind of reminds me of Palpatine's attitude regarding the Jedi after RotS--"Star Wars? Why are we still talking about Star Wars? It's over!"

    JJM claims that it was hard for people to tell the Wookiee characters apart in the "Kazhyyyk" story, but I don't recall having that problem.

    Unsurprisingly, the Nagai, the Hiromi, and the planet Saijo were all named after Japanese artists of the time, proving that even fifteen years before the Yuuzhan Vong, Asia was the go-to culture for exotic-sounding words. [face_whistling]

    Despite LFL's ambivalence toward the main SW title, the Ewoks ongoing that debuted six months before the former's cancellation survived another two years. oh, eighties, you silly thing.

    The initial artist on the Droids series was no less then John Romita Sr. :eek:

    Hearing that LFL was actively suppressing major plot development after RotJ makes it even more surprising that they actually got the Rebels off Endor.

    From #103-107 the series was released bi-monthly--okay, so maybe there was some advance warning of the cancellation. Duffy was "in the middle" of writing #107 when she found out, so sure enough, things would've gone much differently with even a few issues' heads-up.

    The Nagai-Tof War, Bey, etc - thoughts on new canon

    Had to expand my research beyond just the NTW article; I didn't realize how much new stuff there was about Bey and the Alliance.

    The Nagai allied themselves with Faruun shipbuilders from their home galaxy--so I'm assuming the fancy-shmancy ships they use in the comics are Faruun designs, not Nagai.

    Interesting that the Maccabrees are cephalopods, yet when we see them lose limbs in the comics the limbs appear totally mechanical. I suppose their natural limbs must run only a small portion of the length of their exosuits--they're more starfish than octopus, in other words.

    Oh, and the suits are Faruun, too. That's cool--I actually like the Firefist species being less tech-savvy on the whole.

    And speaking of which, I was surprised to see that the name "Firefist" came not from JMM, but from the Unknown Regions RPG book, which came out a year after TFW...maybe I'll have to look into that thing too.

    The Nagai name for the GFFA is "Skyriver", which is almost as badass as "Firefist".

    Bey started out working for CorSec--that makes his reputation more understandable. I wonder if he knew Corran or Iella.

    Krai H'voc made me realize that we don't see any female Nagai in the comics. One thing I thought was weird about Bey was that his white hair and huge size didn't have any obvious connection to his Nagai heritage; now I wonder if maybe Nagai females are white-haired and/or larger than the males--and being a half-breed just mixed up what traits went where. Have any female Nagai been seen since then?

    One retcon that I have to admit bugs me: I could do with less of the exotic species = super-complicated-name trope. "Mitth'raw'nuruodo" was enough--"N'takkilomandrife" is pushing it; especially when the other fully-named Nagai have shorter-than-average names if anything. I appreciated seeing "bizarre" alien invaders named "Den" and "Tai".

    "Bright Tree Base"--nice.

    The comics sort of infer that Vader was training Lumiya between the accident and her reappearance, but I like the idea of sending her on an expedition to Korriban, etc instead. Plus it keeps Vader from being too busy in those months.

    So Bakura is definitely before all the diplomatic missions, but I wonder if Jawas of Doom, at least, could fit into the beginning span of the book? I don't remember what Han and Leia were up to right then.

    Also, if his nickname came from his use of knives, why sneak "Knife", phonetically at least, into his real name at all? JMM, explain yourself. :p

    If The Forgotten War had come out post-Atlas, it would've been cool to include a "Nagai Incursion Points" map. *coughsupplementcough*

    You know, given what I've read about LFL's initial handling of the post-RotJ timeline, I'm kind of surprised they even let Duffy give Luke a second lightsaber. I guess extra weapons don't count as character development.

    Ah, the Hoojibs picked up the name "Nagi" telepathically. That answers that question.

    "Dal Zorfenn" and "Cyn Jodu"--better. :D

    Longneck, Brute, Spider, Swoop...admit it JMM, this was all just about naming wook articles, wasn't it? ;)

    Reading about the evacuation of the Endor Base, and can I just say how refreshing it is that there's only one? [face_relieved]

    Doesn't look like anything's been done officially on the Tof ships, but I maintain that they got ahold of a Fairwind-style NSW ship and reverse-engineered it. We are talking about a species that fights with clubs, after all--I'd just as soon they not have figured out how to do this:

    [​IMG]

    Kyle, Dash Rendar, and Guri were working with Bey on Saijo! Cheers, Halagad_Ventor!

    Final Thoughts

    Well, this is it. I still have a few things I want to (re)read, like the Gamer Starhoppers article and all the "modern" Lando/Drebble stories, but unless there's something I come across that's dying to be discussed, I'm just gonna read those all regular-like.

    For, I don't even know, maybe six or seven years now, I've kept a little text file on my desktop called "TO DO", specifically for long-term projects. To give you an idea of the scale of things that make it onto that list, the last one I removed was "get driver's license" (only took me until I was 28!), and the next up is "learn Spanish". After I post this, I'm gonna go into that file, and at long, long, last, delete "marvel star wars". Even before I started this thread four and a half years ago, I think it'd been on there for at least a year already, so this has been, perhaps sadly, the feat of a lifetime for me.

    Looking back, the main thing I would say about the series as a whole is that it's really not as bad as you think it's gonna be. In the interview thread I mentioned that I think TPM's a better film than AotC because even though it doesn't reach the latter's heights, it's more consistent overall; I think the biggest failing of the Marvel series is inconsistency. Some of it is really awesome by the standards of the time, and some of that is awesome even by modern standards. And the vast majority of the bad stuff isn't really bad storytelling, it's just implausible and/or silly and/or poorly-thought-out. But those are aesthetic issues more than anything else, and I'm sure we'd all have found them much more palatable thirty years ago. While I think it never really got past the implausibility problem, the series as a whole really did evolve and mature a great deal over the years, and the writing just plain got better--Jo Duffy manages to tell more of one big story in her forty issues or so than anyone else even tries to in the previous seventy. Likewise, Cynthia Martin was a huge improvement over Tom Palmer, who was a huge improvement over Carmine Infantino. All in all, I have to think that if it had kept going at that pace, by 1991 it could've been telling stories at least as good as Dark Empire's (provided LFL had let them). For that matter, I do still wonder what the EU would look like now if they'd unshackled Jo Duffy and we'd gotten her version of the continuing war with the Empire--and what that would've meant for the Thrawn Trilogy.

    And speaking of continuity, that's another area where it's really not all that bad--at least if you can stick to the broad strokes, which is where stuff like The Forgotten War really works perfectly. From a timeline standpoint, part of me really wishes I'd attempted to track exactly how much time is covered over the course of the series, but thinking back, my vague impression is that the ANH-ESB stuff could be as little as 3-6 months' worth of activity, which is nowhere near what I was expecting. ESB-RotJ is trickier, just because of how epic SotE is, but even there, IMO, you could get it down into a month or two cumulatively without killing yourself. The one big, serious continuity issue I have that I never got a satisfactory answer to, despite the comic itself promising otherwise, was Luke's post-ESB lightsaber. It's definitely intended to be the one from ESB, but I could live with it being the RotJ saber if I was at least sure the whole forty-issue stretch could then fit after he builds the thing--but I'm just not sure.

    So with all that said, I guess I'm done. Thanks to everyone for reading, to JJM, JMM (confusing much, you two?) and Jason for sharing their thoughts from time to time, and especially thanks to the handful of you who were here at the beginning. Henceforth: I hereby, officially, and with all the pretend authority I can muster, bequeath this thread to AdmiralNick22, in the hopes that he will soon commence his own magical quest full of trippy-ass Star Destroyers, talking bunnies (telepathic or otherwise), and exposition...lots and lots of exposition. Nick, kindly replace my name in the title with yours. I'm going to bed.


    [​IMG]
     
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  3. pronker

    pronker Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jan 28, 2007
    Good night. I had all the Marvels upon first publication, and have enjoyed your reviews and astounding amount of backstory on the issues. Silly, yes, some stories were; they had great spirit, though.
     
  4. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Basically you get the book in box that includes a cassette and you are meant to read the book whilst also listening to the story getting told on the cassette, which comes with sound effects and all.


    [​IMG]
    Seems to be one


    Öh the Atlas had one ;)

    You might want to check the Tof section in the Unknown Regions Sourcebook on their ships ;) it explains rather well were they come up with the idea.

    Yeah that’s not saying much. :p



    Would likely just be more Warlords they were fighting against; much more interesting is the question if we would have still gotten Mara if Zahn was not told to ignore the Marvel comics.
     
  5. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
  6. MercenaryAce

    MercenaryAce Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 10, 2005
    Yeah, but the thing about them is: they fight with clubs for fun.


    They are actually a super high-tech race whose homeworld is a utopia.

    Problem is, utopias are boring, so a lot of Tof love to go out and play pirate with archaic looking ships and weapons while droids maintain their society and keep it functioning.

    (This is from the Unknown Regions sourcebook)
     
  7. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
    So they're just dicks, then.

    Ohriiiiight...
     
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  8. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2005
    As much as I disliked the Marvel comics back in the day (and in actuality, I thought the Shira Brie arc was fantastic, I was just utterly repelled by the whole Bespin story), in the end I'm glad that the EU authors embraced it and pushed against LFL putting it in the trash bin. It did follow a few stereotypes of tie-in comics, but it lasted much longer than they usually did (and probably would have continued without LFL's interference - which is in itself interesting that they were concerned about what stories they told even then) and while it plus the few other books forming the proto-EU wasn't enough to sustain an "expanded universe" on its own, I think that the spirit of the comics was infused in the early novels - and it certainly was in WEG's RPG.
     
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  9. MercenaryAce

    MercenaryAce Chosen One star 6

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    Aug 10, 2005
    Pretty much.
     
  10. jSarek

    jSarek VIP star 4 VIP

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    Feb 18, 2005
    It's not just that. Martin and Duffy were some of the earliest Western comics creators to be influenced by Japanese comics and animation. The look of the Nagai was one of the first introductions of manga/anime style to American comics. So this was likely an active homage, rather than just looking for exotic-sounding words.

    As was pointed out upthread, yes, and their size is unexceptional. My pet theory on Bey's stature has always been that Nagai and Human genetics interact in a way similar to tigers and lions, and that Bey is analogous to a liger.

    Congratulations, man. I'm surprised the ride has been this long; it just doesn't seem that long ago that you buckled your seat belt.
     
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  11. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

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    Dec 16, 2012
    What part of "they look like they belong to the curt of Versailles or the house of Hanover" did you not understand
     
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  12. Lugija

    Lugija Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Oct 3, 2009
    This thread is missing the Glorious Destiny of Hiromi!

    [​IMG]

    Just because their invasion has been planned for 2000 years, I want them to be comically tied into Darth Ruin. Perhaps he and and a Hiromi tourist changed suitcases by accident.
     
  13. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
    May as well address the comments about my article...

    Based on what we saw in the comics, it seemed to me the Maccabree bodies were only in the center of the suit, while the head, arms and legs were all false. When I decided what they were like in there, I just figured they had to be more than just the giant faces we saw in the comic. It's obviously still sort of vague exactly how they are put together.

    The name Skyriver came from The Essential Atlas, though it had not come out before I started writing the article. Dan Wallace and Jason Fry were nice enough to give me a little preview of the Nagai info they'd written for that book. The funny thing is, for a while both the book and article hadn't come out yet, and I was kind of hoping mine would beat the Atlas and be the premiere of that name. :) Also, some of the other random battles mentioned in passing were added last minute after I finally read the whole Atlas.

    One of the issue #100 flashbacks shows Bey won the Bloodstripe and he's wearing some kind of uniform. Since nothing suggested he ever worked for the Empire, CorSec seemed like the next logical group. Incidentally, those flashback scenes include the actual first appearance of Corellia and in a retconny way, Coronet.

    Though it's not official, in my mind, that first batch of post-ROTJ issues all happened after the week that comprised the Bakura incident. I think dialogue even suggests Han and Leia were elsewhere when Luke went to Iskalon. I had my own idea of how those stories and Rogue Leader fit together, but I thought it was better to focus on the real subject of article.

    Those long names came from an article I had nothing to do with, so ask those guys. :)

    Well, that actually sort of was the idea. But more specifically, I wanted to give them names that made it possible to guess which ones I was referring to without having the article be filled with images.

    Yes, I was happy when Abel wrote that, and it actually also gave me an established excuse to move that battle later in the timeline. Since Dash and Guri were involved, it had to be after Shadows of the Empire: Evolution, which was set a few months or so after ROTJ.

    Anyone who doesn't think the discussion on my article is exhausted by now, there are two Endnotes articles I did back then, which explains the sources and my thoughts behind some of it:
    Endnotes for The Forgotten War: The Nagai and the Tofs
    Endnotes for The Forgotten War - Addendum

    One reason I followed this thread was that I like to see people discover the Marvel stories and learn that they've got a much worse reputation than they deserved. And my article was also a way of helping to make it fit a bit better in with the rest of the Expanded Universe. There is some dumb, silly stories in the mix, but we're talking 107 monthly issues of stories, and it's not as if every thing put out by Dark Horse, Bantam or Del Rey over the years has been gold. :)
     
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  14. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
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  15. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

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    Jul 8, 1999
    Another weird thing--although it could just be the art--is that the faces appear to be part of the suit, rather than a biological feature that's sticking out of it. My headcanon is that they're totally covered and the suits are just designed to "read" whatever passes for facial expressions in the species and translate them into something humanoids can understand.

    Oh, that's from the Sanbra thing--I see now. My bad.
     
  16. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 29, 2005
    JUST BUY THE COMICS I'M TELLING YOU.
     
  17. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
    The art there is definitely open to interpretation there. I'm kind of thinking that face is inside the armor, maybe you can kind of see through it or something. Without looking back at the issue, does anyone besides Luke see that face? How about we're just seeing Luke's impressions through the Force, and that face isn't actually "visible"?
     
  18. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

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    Jul 8, 1999
    ...how is that better? :p
     
  19. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

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    Jul 9, 1998
    I never said it was... :)
     
  20. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Force Ghost star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
    The most convenient explanation for the post-ROTJ saber is that it's Orman's... no?
     
  21. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Force Ghost star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
    Err, post ESB, that is.
     
  22. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

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    Jul 8, 1999
    I guess that's possible, but no one's bothered to say so in anything I've seen. And even if that were the retcon we ended up with, I'd still be curious what Marvel had planned to say about it way back when.
     
  23. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
    I figure it's one of two things. The first is, they never really paid much attention to the fact that he lost his lightsaber in the movie. The second is, they did notice that but they figured they couldn't have dozens of issues of Star Wars without Luke Skywalker having a lightsaber.

    If you think about it, until that short story / RPG suggesting Vader retrieved the lightsaber or Zahn's use of it in the Thrawn Trilogy (I forget which came first), they could have maybe said the Falcon retrieved it somehow in TESB. But one thing's for sure. He had to get it somewhere.
     
  24. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

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    Jul 8, 1999
    Yeah, OOU, it's pretty clear they'd have wanted him to have one somehow. I did indeed assume at first that they thought he'd recovered it...until issue #73, when someone on the letters page actually asked about it and they said "all will be explained in due time." If it was as simple as "he didn't really lose it in ESB", why do a tease like that? I'm 50/50 on whether they planned to address it somehow but didn't or they already knew he'd have built a new one in RotJ and just used the blue saber design in the meantime for want of a better option.
     
  25. JMM

    JMM Author: The Forgotten War, SW Fact File star 3 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 9, 1998
    This only works years later, but remember that the cut scene from ROTJ is not official, so Luke built the lightsaber during Shadows of the Empire. So, if we can ignore the saber's actual design and color, he is at least using his new one from about issue #70 on.
     
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