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Post by jensaltmann on Dec 16, 2009 3:26:01 GMT -8
In case you don't know, the Star Wars merchandising machine is marching on: Star Wars in Concert. www.starwarsinconcert.com/It appears that the only concert in Germany will be in Hamburg. Where I live. On April 8. Which is my birthday. You might remember that I work for the German Star Wars comics series. I found out about the concert yesterday. I suggested to my editors that it would be a good idea to get me backstage passes, so that I can report about it and perhaps interview Anthony Daniels, who will be hosting the event. This is particularly convenient because my deadline for the bi-monthly SW columns is the week after the event. They think it's a good idea and will see what they can do. Wish me luck.
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Post by Anders on Dec 18, 2009 9:24:21 GMT -8
Excellent! The best of luck!
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Post by K-Box on Dec 18, 2009 21:08:30 GMT -8
Seriously, this is awesome.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Dec 19, 2009 5:45:58 GMT -8
Go get it!
Cheers.
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Post by jensaltmann on Jun 11, 2011 2:37:22 GMT -8
I'm resurrecting this as a general Star Wars thread. As you know (and might have forgotten), I write three regular columns for the German edition of the Star Wars comics. One of the columns is a character profile. It's gotten to the point where I find it difficult to pick and choose among the remaining characters. I've mined it, well, not completely -- luckily, they still publish novels and comics and TV shows... One of the biggest differences that I see among the characters I have to profile is the distinction between the novels and the comics. The comics are better. At least, they have better characters. Over the years, the writers of the novels have established new characters to mostly replace the original crew. I dropped out of reading the Star Wars novels four or five books into the Yuuzhan Vong war, because it was reaching an "unreadble" level. I suppose I'm simply not fan enough. But upon writing the character profiles of characters that came into prominence in the novels during that period, I realized just what it was that probably put me off. Other than generic bad writing... Almost every character that I've profiled that was created during the Yuuzhan Vong war would fail the Mary Sue test. That also applies to characters created earlier (I'm looking at you, Mike Stackpole and Corran Horn), but there's a greater abundance of these among the characters that were created from the late 1990s onwards.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jun 11, 2011 5:12:55 GMT -8
Not a surprise, given ther restrictions that had to be worked with in the Star Wars EU, but interesting none the less.
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Post by Mario Di Giacomo on Jun 11, 2011 5:14:53 GMT -8
I've said this before, but hey, you gave me a venue. The biggest problem with the EU is that they've forgotten that the core concept of the OT is that it's a FAIRY TALE. It starts out with "Once upon a time" "A long, long time ago" and ends with (essentially) "and they lived happily ever after". But with very few exceptions, most of the stories that take place post-ROTJ (and pretty much ALL of the main storyline books), are showing that the characters didn't live happily ever after, at all. The government they helped set up collapsed, its successor is basically teetering on the edge of becoming another Empire, old friends (and their own children) have died, some after turning evil, and dark Force users are cropping up like weeds. The post-ROTJ SW universe sucks. It's not a place of heroes, but of petty politicals and disaster after disaster. I actually prefer the stories that take place well before the movies, that have unrelated characters. There, even if we know the goog guys might always win clean, at lest we know there's a happy ending of sorts. For example: (this is a long one. Three trailers combined)
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Post by jensaltmann on Jun 11, 2011 6:31:25 GMT -8
Kind of agreed. The Legacy set is too "grim & gritty" for my liking, but my favorite of the comics? Knights of the Old Republic. It was simply fun. It had the adventure, the war, the intrigue -- but it didn't take itself very seriously. And yes, that was exactly why I liked it.
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Post by Mario Di Giacomo on Jun 11, 2011 6:44:57 GMT -8
Right era, but I'm a bit more old school:
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Post by jensaltmann on Jun 11, 2011 7:44:13 GMT -8
(I edited your post because the picture didn't show.)
I'm not all that fond of that period. The stories weren't bad, they thought big and OTT, and were creative, but I never warmed to the art.
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Post by Anders on Jun 11, 2011 12:15:31 GMT -8
To me, anything much removed from the original trilogy (and yes, that includes the prequels) doesn't really feel like Star Wars. The only similarity is that they have laser swords and people with freaky mental powers, and that's hardly unique features in SF.
(Which doesn't mean they can't be entertaining, it's just... more like a cheap ripoff or something that accidentally is similar to SW, rather than the real thing.)
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Post by Mario Di Giacomo on Jun 11, 2011 12:37:54 GMT -8
(I edited your post because the picture didn't show.) I'm not all that fond of that period. The stories weren't bad, they thought big and OTT, and were creative, but I never warmed to the art. That's fair. For me, art has to be pretty bad to detract from a good story. (I had the hardest time with that photo for some reason…)
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