Knights of the Old Republic #1: Commencement, part 1 (of 6)

I've_Got_Two_Legs: While all that's true... *points to previous post and to Leto II's post* The timeline is far enough back that all of that hasn't happened yet. What, exactly, is the placement of this on the timeline, everyone? It obviously has to be more than 5 years before KotOR I, though from what I recall not significantly so...

Oh, and I wished to comment - I really rather like the artwork so far, and the story itself is promising. I'm looking forward to seeing the development of the Mandalorian Wars.

- Keralys

 

Dude. You need to play KOTOR. It envokes the same feeling I get when I watch the orginal Star Wars. Or indeed, the feeling I'm sure my parents had when they saw Star Wars for the first time. in my opinion, beter than even ESB or ROTJ. That's just me, but I have run into only two people in my life who haven't loved it (Rhoniss and someone else in the game section).

P.s. RHoniss-you know what's more silly than the KOTOR weapons being similer to the OT weapons?-the idea of soldiers of a spave faring empire to use spears. Or to ride on ships intsead of in them. Or to use animals instead of tanks.

What I want to know in regards to the TOTJ comics is why there was so much weird asthetics in TOTJ that disapeared and became industerial again in the OT.

Back to the new comic-must see Madno wars. Maybe they will even have republic and Mandolorian tanks?

 

Well, in response to the last question, that's easy. 4000 years will do that in a hurry.

The real question is where those aesthetics went in the 40 years between the comic and the game... that is basically the only thing that's hard to reconcile between them. The continuity of the game to the comics was exceptionally well done; more so than any other game set in the Star Wars universe has been, certainly - and that's a high compliment, because a number of games have been well-researched and coordinated.

- Keralys

 

You could argue that (a.) the KotOR comic is OT-era historical fiction, or (b.) shielding tech rendered projectile weapons and mechanized armour useless, Dune-style, until Star Forge tech came along...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Technology evidently leapfrogged far enough during the post-Exar Kun ritornelle to bring it up to that level. The march of war, and all. Also, there's a Taris shopkeep who goes into interesting detail at one point concerning how a new resurgence in Republic and Sith personal shield-tech (coming out of the Mandalorian Wars) has recently ushered in a renaissance in hand-to-hand combat.

This, coupled with other dialogue on the cortosis weapon-making situation, tends to support the assertion.

That said, there are a number of "classic" TotJ visual-motifs in the games, though...many of the lightsabers bear the crennellated "jaggedy" tops seen in Chris Gossett's and Dario Carrasco's work, amongst other things.

Another point to consider:

Look no further than Ood Bnar's buried Ossusian lightsaber cache from The Sith War -- all antiquey and old-timey-looking in the Tales of the Jedi comics, yet when Luke and the other Ysanna dig them up four millennia later in Dark Empire II, what do we see?

The movie-style "flashlight" look.

Given this, whatever we see in the games can be considered "subjective" enough to overlay the ancient-styled effigies atop the more "modern" KotOR visual cues.

 

Or, as I like to see it, that the new aesthetic design was a backlash against the previous mode, much as the designs of the Imperial era were drastically different than their forerunners of the Old Republic era from a utilitarian standpoint. I suppose we should keep in mind as well that much of what we're seeing as technological differences may actually and essentially be aesthetic preferences differing from era to era - that the starfighters of the DLotS era are really probably close to on par with those of the KotOR-game era, but simply have a different visual styling to them, a visual styling that was tossed out as the Republic streamlined its industrial capabilities after the Exar Kun war and particularly during the course of the Mandalorian war...

As for the planets themselves, note that we only really saw glimpses of more developed worlds in the DLotS sequence, and those themselves can I think be explained away in their own sense.

I am personally not a fan of pushing either side too far to make it overlap directly with the other. Finding a middle bridge point - as the comic appears to be doing from a visual standpoint, in terms of our young Jedi hero's costume and so forth - is, IMHO the best path that can possibly be taken for this era.

- Keralys

 

P.s. RHoniss-you know what's more silly than the KOTOR weapons being similer to the OT weapons?-the idea of soldiers of a spave faring empire to use spears. Or to ride on ships intsead of in them. Or to use animals instead of tanks.

You mean like...

1. The Crimson Guard

2. Tauntaums

Star Wars is fantasy, Walkers are idiotic by any stretch of the imagination yet they look cool. Also swords...

But they work because that's how Star Wars physics works. It's why everyone who complains a double bladed lightsaber is a stupid weapon is an idiot. Your knowledge is useless to this world.

 

Ah, true Rhoniss. Very true.

Glad I touhed of conversations about why asthetics changed. I geuss those things do change a lot over the years.

i geuss the big problem is that KOTOR happens before Jedi vs Sith, which is more similer to the TOTJ than Kotor, IIRC.

I geuss they all have their place.

But buy the game. Do it. NOW.

 

Most people have difficulty grasping "Dark Ages" I find.

 

Someone asked about the comics placement - 3,964 BBY, or the year before the start of the Mandalorian Wars.

 

Looking forwards to it. Unfortunently, I won't be able to get it, unless it's being released in the UK.

 

Rukil!

And Igear . . . the Imperial tech face from the Mara comic.

 

Can't wait for the TPB.

Now to see if these issues will handle the fact that the galaxy really invested into clone technology big-time after the Sith War, as well as to why Tott Doneeta had to resort to changing his name.

Wouldn't mind to see why Vima Sunrider became one of the 'greatest Jedi of her age'. I mean, it's been mentioned over and over again how she was one helluva Jedi, but did we ever get to see it?

 

Oh, absolutely. In fact, The New Essential Chronology, at the end of the Tales of the Jedi: Redemption section, has this to say on Vima's future (p. 22):

[...] With such a beginning to her career as a Jedi Knight, Vima Sunrider learned much and eventually became one of the greatest Jedi of her age.

Now, all other things being equal...there has to be SOMETHING done to address this, as this sentiment has been echoed in still other official sources beyond the NEC. This is one of the major, critical personal storytelling points I'd long advocated Dark Horse exploring since the first KotOR game hit huge -- hell, really since Redemption itself concluded.

Vima's age during the opening issues of Knights of the Old Republic? Thirty-seven years young. Gerontology being what it is in the GFFA, she'd still be at the utter height of her powers as a Jedi.

(How do we define an "age"? Five years? Ten? Fifty? Did she attain knighthood two years later, burned so very, very brightly à la Roy Batty, then died just a scant year or two after that? I highly doubt this stretchy, sketchy interpretation holds water. She'd had to have been a total human amphetamine to warrant such a lofty tribute and still snuff it decades before the KotOR series. Which we don't see exhibited at all in that final TotJ story.)

For the last couple of years, here's a story that's begged telling, and for which the wherewithal now exists in the pages of the new series; the recent comments made by certain folks in the DH editorial junta, in this very thread, indicate that they might perhaps be inclined toward sufficient follow-through to put these issues to rest.

(Oh, and give burrie a Tott-splanation too, would you? )

 

Technically, given that Vima-Da-Boda had a markedly extended lifespan, her great-great-great-grandmother's "age" could be centuries after KotOR... the average generation in that family was about 1,000 years, with Vima being a mere spring-chicken bringing up a young daughter as a centenarian...

And I assume the "very old Jedi" Ashka Boda (who Palpatine took the Holocron off) was some close relative, too...?

Hmm. Ashka Boda, very old Jedi = Cronal?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Almost posted a Vima-Da-Boda pointer there just now, Thrawn, but agreed there would've been potential there for an extended lifespan; Ms. Da-Boda herself lived for a couple centuries and had that trampy skeeze of a daughter (Neema), yet was a mere five or six generations removed from the Sunriders.

The Ashka Boda/Sunrider/Vima-Da-Boda family axis has for a long while been another theory of mine, too. Force-bloodlines being what they are -- and considering how pressed the Jedi Order was for warm bodies in its last years of existence -- you'd have to think that they'd allow SOME extended familial connections (and indeed they did, in other cases).

Although I think the Dark Empire Sourcebook mentions that Ashka Boda died screaming.

 

An interview with the writer of the series:

OF KNIGHTS AND OLDEN (STAR WARS) TIMES
So what happened waaaay before Episode I? We mean waaay, waaaay before. John Miller talks about Knights of the Old Republic...

http://www.newsarama.com/DarkHorsenew/StarWars/Knights/MillerKotOR.htm

 

Frickin' sweet!

I?m a big believer in ?continuity-as-Easter-eggs,? as readers may have seen.

And there's a new page of art. Looks like we have some new Jedi, including a Miraluka, a Nautolan (or a Feeorin), a Togruta, and a Khil.

 

Yes!! Couldn't agree more, ner vod.

 

Well, it depends. Feeorins usually don't have noses or at least Nym doesn't, though some illustrations (Ultimate Alien Anthology) give them one. I guess this one is based on the UAA pic (same color too.)

Yep, the Khil, first described by WEG.

[image=http://www.rancorpit.com/images/khil.jpg]

 

Nym's Jedi ancestor! (There's a future Excellence-curse in the offing.) And now we know who the Palpatine-Looking Guy is.

But...no way. No phuquing way.

Is that a *Chiss* Jedi standing next to the Miraluka, or is that simply a trick of the coloring?

Couldn't be. Although we know they did have contact of some form or another with the outer galaxy, per the second game.

From the article, by the numbers:

NRAMA: Had you expressed an interest to Dark Horse in this era of Star Wars prior to this?

JJM: I was familiar with it -- though not nearly as familiar with the movie-era stuff. But with the Knights of the Old Republic video game line doing so well, and no regular Dark Horse comics in this era in some time, there was a lot of pent-up demand -- as evidenced by the great response just the series announcement alone got from the Star Wars fan base in San Diego. And in exploring the time period, I found I?d actually be better able to tell the kinds of stories I was interested in during this period. There turn out to be a lot more familiar things in this era than you might think -- and, being relatively less congested in terms of established history, I have a lot more options.

Damn straight.

NRAMA: Let?s hit the era itself where did the Knights world come from? Is it part of Lucas? original vision for the SW Universe, or is it all ancillary, created after he planted his seeds?

JJM: The genesis from this era comes strictly from comics, so far as I understand it. Several Tales of the Jedi series that Dark Horse did in the mid-1990s kick off a chronology that begins four thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. It's Kevin Anderson and Tom Veitch, mostly, but certainly they were drawing on Lucas' ideas of the "thousands of years" the Jedi kept the peace. That's the first place we see the Knights of the Old Republic name, incidentally -- it's the trade paperback name given to the first five Tales of the Jedi issues.

There were other developments to that era later on: In novels, Anderson refers to that era again in the Jedi Academy trilogy, and West End did a game sourcebook that elaborated on it. What turned those sparks into a brushfire, though, was the best-selling video game series started a few years ago -- Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords.

Even threw in a shout-out to WEG's JA Sourcebook -- the dude apparently knows his stuff cold. Which bodes quite well for this series.

When LucasArts developed the first video game, they set it a generation or so after the last Dark Horse material in this era. The galaxy has dramatically changed, since then -- and one of the things my series does is bridge that gap, to an extent. You do not have to be familiar with either the existing comics or the games -- though if you are, there?s a bonus level of richness there for you. And I hear the gamers like bonus levels...

Hallelujah. This just made my friggin' week. That, and the Bane-novel title announcement.

Was thinking it would be nice to have a new TotJ-era Star Wars series that wouldn't be a complete insult to the intellectual capacity of a retarded lobotomized aardvark that's been dead atop a Serengeti ant-hill for five weeks in midsummer...but then again, I was already sold on this one weeks ago. This simply ices the cake.

JJM: There are Jedi and Sith, and plenty of each -- although, at the beginning of my series, where the Sith are and what they?re doing isn?t immediately apparent.

The one-master/one-apprentice business with the Sith in the era of the movies is a relatively new development, going back only about a thousand years. Essentially the Sith finally got wise to the fact that every time they got control of the galaxy, they?d ruin i

 

The art's not doing much for me, but the writer seems not to be an idiot, so I'm looking forward to this.

 

Well, by Ruusan the Republic had been in a dark age for 500 years, and the Sith had had nearly the entire Galaxy whittled away from them during Hoth's lifespan alone.

 

Not so much that, rather his "[The galaxy] is on year 21,000 or so of hyperspace travel just by the time you hit our series -- and by now, technology?s advanced about to where it?s going to go" statement...which suggests that this state of affairs is ALWAYS going to hold, when we know in fact that the Republic Dark Age kicks in and downgrades society rather significantly.

But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, here, and assume a vague overabstraction from whence he spoke.