Art for this piece comes courtesy of Craig Bogart of “The Ineffables” fame. Craig Bogart’s The Ineffables on Amazon.
Art for this piece comes courtesy of Craig Bogart of “The Ineffables” fame. Craig Bogart’s The Ineffables on Amazon.
Look, I loved Star Wars as much as the next guy.
I had the Star Wars bedsheets. I built an Ewok village in the woods behind my house. My love for my Uncle Dale is based largely on the fact that he bought me a snowspeeder one Christmas. I remember vividly seeing Return of the Jedi in theaters with my Mom. I was 7.
But, I dunno, I kind of drifted out of it in high school. I recall rewatching Empire Strikes Back on TV — the good one, right? — and thinking “this dialog’s a little stilted.” And I did not have especially good taste as a teenager.
I sold almost all of my action figures to my biology teacher around 1993 … yep, only a few years before they might have been worth something.
I caught the first of the reissues in college, but I skipped the second two. Count me as a “Han shoots first” partisan. My primary experience of the original trilogy is a VHS set of the original, unfucked version. Those tapes don’t show a lot of wear.
And yeah, I saw the prequels. I can tell you the exact moment I sat up during Episode I and said “That was bullshit.” It’s when Qui-Gon and Darth Maul have a desultory fight on the ramp to the silver shuttle, and Qui-Gon just jumps aboard. It’s two swings and it’s over. We missed a cool lightsaber battle so we could watch a space rastafarian step in space poo.
It’s not that I can’t enjoy Star Wars. I caught the first season of the Clone Wars show on the Cartoon Network … I think Kevin Church referred to that series as the last time he sought out a Star Wars piece and actively enjoyed it. That’s about right.
But the nail in the coffin was something I actually really liked: Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy. I devoured the whole series in about five days in 1998, losing basically a whole week of work productivity. I remember sitting in my car between assignments, anxiously reading the book. It’s expertly plotted, epicin scope, and brings the sci-fi action. Most notably, for the first time it gives an idea of the philosophy of the Imperial Navy.
Then I read the Dark Empire, an early 90s comic series from Dark Horse. It’s a standard GvsE with the Emperor returning in clone bodies, him tempting Luke for some reason, and friggin’ planet crushers.
The Zahn books are a hell of a lot better, but Dark Empire is a lot more Star Wars.
I’ll always be a fan of the original series, and I’ll watch new stuff if I have reason to believe it’ll be good. But I’m far from a fanatic.
Art for this storyline comes courtesy of Craig Bogart, who you can now find on Amazon Kindle. Craig Bogart’s The Ineffables: Face of the Monster.
Whoops, had a little technical hiccup there. We should be back to posting now.
Art for this storyline comes courtesy of Craig Bogart, who you can now find on Amazon Kindle. Craig Bogart’s The Ineffables: Face of the Monster.