Star Wars... Damn It

George Lucas got his hooks in me early. I have very few precise memories of childhood, but several vague ones involving Star Wars. I seem to remember seeing the first one with my dad and my uncle and having my mind blown. I specifically remember waiting in line to see Empire Strikes Back, and debating with my friends whether or not Vader was Luke's father. (I'm pretty sure I had decided that he wasn't by the time Return of the Jedi came out).

I was even an apologist for the first prequel for maybe the first couple nights after I saw it, although part of that might have been that I had already booked a second screening with a lot of folks for the night of the rehearsal dinner of my wedding, and I didn't want to admit that it was a letdown, so it wouldn't taint that event. Didn't last, though... within a few weeks I was admitting what most of us already knew: Episode I was pretty bad.

I hadn't learned my lesson entirely, though. I still bought Episode I on DVD. I went to see Episode II, despite misgivings... and it was worse. The Anakin/Padme romance remains one of the more painful things I've ever sat through in a theater. Then there was Episode III. I swore I wasn't going to see it. Then a bunch of folks starting talking about how it was great, how it was so much better than the other two prequels, how it was better than Return of the Jedi.

They were wrong. It blew. Just like the other prequels.

But then there were the Clone Wars cartoons by Tartakovsky, which were amazing. The spinoff comics from Dark Horse have generally been pretty damned good. So I sort of came to a place where anything Lucas was heavily involved in, I'd write off, but anything where he was on the outskirts, I'd still give it a shot. I was kind of excited about the Clone Wars movie/TV show coming, but I've seen in several interviews that Lucas has been heavily involved. In my mind, I'd already written it off.

And then the damn marketing machine kicked in again. And it has a supreme power over me. I bought Soul Calibur IV, and though I'd been mildly interested in Force Unleashed already, being able to play The Apprentice has made me actually anxious to buy the game. Today the Clone Wars soundtrack came out, and the hooks are still in me enough that all I had to do was take a bit of a listen and decide to buy it, and I really like it so far.

I've been eyeing the Star Wars miniatures and the Star Wars role-playing game, and I have several ideas for campaigns. Never mind that I don't have time for another RPG, but I think it's more than likely that I'll be buying some of that stuff in the very near future.

And I find myself thinking I want to see Clone Wars in the theaters. I'm almost certain it's going to disappoint. I'm going to watch the reviews pretty closely, and if it doesn't get a glowing reaction from a majority, I'm going to try and resist, because even a moderately positive reaction probably just means apologists being kind to it, but damn it... I want to see the damn thing in theaters now.

Curse you, Lucas! Why did you have to stink up the franchise? Clearly nothing can fully deter me from loving it, so I wish it could actually be good most of the time, instead of on rare occasions.

Graphic Novel A Day: Star Wars General Grievous

Writer: Chuck Dixon
Artist: Rick Leonardi
Company: Dark Horse
Price: $12.95 ($10.75 at Amazon)

I'm cheating a bit, because I actually read this a couple weeks back, but I haven't read any graphic novels over the last day or so, and so I'm finally giving this one a write-up. At any rate, this is a mostly forgettable although decently done miniseries tying into Episode III. My hope was that Dixon and Leonardi, both known for doing solid if rarely spectacular work, would be giving us the never-revealed origin of Grievous. That doesn't happen here. Instead, it's a story of Grievous killing Jedi and kidnapping Jedi children, and of Jedi children standing up to him. It's about some Jedi seeking revenge because the council is too wussy to stand up to him. Basically, it highlights a lot of what I didn't like about the character, as opposed to what I did, which was the stuff in the Tartakovsky cartoons. That said, there's some solid action, an interesting backstory tying in Empire Strikes Back's Ugnaughts to the Republic era and he's still a more interesting character here than he was in the movie. Seriously, George, a cough? That's the tic you gave your big bad guy? Why not have him limp and have trouble going to the bathroom too?

Graphic Novel A Day: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Vol. 1: Commencement

Writer: John Jackson Miller
Artists: Brian Ching & Travel Foreman
Company: Dark Horse Comics
Price: $18.95 ($13.45 at Amazon)

I haven't played the Knights of the Old Republic videogame, but I've been meaning to, and reading this graphic novel just reinforces that. Miller writes a swashbuckling, adventure-laden story set in the earlier days of the Star Wars Universe that is fun (with touches of darkness in the plot) and has all the feel of a good Star Wars role-playing session. The artwork by Brian Ching and Travel Foreman is nice, the cast of characters interesting and the general plot, about an obsessive group of Jedi who commit an atrocity in hopes of preventing a larger one, pretty solid. I look forward to seeing where future adventures take us.

Graphic Novel A Day: Star Wars Tag & Bink Were Here

Writer: Kevin Rubio
Artist: Lucas Marangon
Company: Dark Horse Comics
Price: $14.95 ($10.17 at Amazon)

I read the original Tag & Bink miniseries, and remember finding it very funny. I read the latest one-shots, and didn't really get much of a chuckle out of them. Reading all the Tag & Bink stories together, my opinion meets in the middle. It wasn't really laugh out loud funny to me, but I had to respect Rubio's clever script, inserting the hapless Tag & Bink into every important event of the various movies, and I really enjoyed the cartoony artwork of Lucas Marangon quite a bit. Dark Horse's Star Wars line is an impressive array of different approaches to the characters, and this parody of them, combined with a loving devotion to continuity that only a true fan could have, is yet another interesting and fun flavor. It's not the first Star Wars book I'd recommend to someone about to dive into the comics, but it's hardly the last one either.