As far as interconnected storytelling goes I remember the oddity of how this series basically tells you Thrawn has to lose and there’s only one book of that series out. I doubt something like that would fly nowadays. But it was a different era.
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And such an amazing era of just *stories*. Want pilots? Want a Death Star but it’s lightsaber shaped? Want Han and Leia getting hitched? Want ghost romance? You’re all set.
At the time, was it assumed they would be the same continuity? Or would a reader have treated it how the Star Trek books and comics made no effort to coordinate.
I assumed it wasn’t until JEDI ACADEMY that a reader would understand they were part of the same story
There were also the Young Adult books that were being made at the same time (Glove of Darth Vader) which were never retrofitted into continuity. I think every project was its intended as its own thing until they realized how much new story was being created.
Which is also why most of those stories reset to the status quo like an episode of a cartoon. That was the idea until they realized, "Oops we can't have babies vanish."
I had some magazine from the time (it was either Starlog or a rando one-of thing) where the book editors talked about how it came to connect and what the rules for authors were, etc.
They were written to be unrelated. Publishing asked Zahn if he'd reference the comics, but understandably he was locked into a pretty tight outline and did not. The comics were then set after his books, but only the text pages or intro crawl reflect that....
.... The comics were written to take place a year after Return of the Jedi, and if you only read the comics pages, that tracks. But the text pages set it six years after Return of the Jedi.
IIRC there was also that line from Han about Jacen & Jaina being “safe on New Alderaan”, which at least puts a fig leaf on it by vaguely referencing Zahn’s story, right?
That rings a bell. I'll have to dig my long boxes out of storage. I would think the series (1991-1992) couldn't name them as their names weren't revealed until The Last Command (1993)
The former, because there was so little it was assumed. At least I did. All the Han and Lando books and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye were all “what happened.” But all that was ancient history, as well as the Marvel series
Yes, but most of that world building was relegated to text pages at the start. If Epic Comics had indeed printed it in 1990 as originally conceived, it would have been set a year after Return of the Jedi.
My memory is that the text pieces in the back of the comics suggested that they would share continuity but I would have to go check my long boxes to be sure.
I still remember reading about how Anderson didn't know he had to take DE into account when he first started writing the Jedi Academy trilogy and had to add references in the revisions (or something close to that).
A similar thing happened with the NJO, where Jacen was supposed to die, and Anakin would survive to be the villain in LotF, but they didn't want another Anakin going dark around the time of RotS. (Anyway, I love hearing about how sausage is made; that's why I make sausages.)
As far as I know, it was written as a direct sequel to the movies, and when you read DE as that, it works pretty good. Yet, when I finished Last Command, it felt decisive, final. And then hearing there is another story with clones, but this time it's Palpatine, felt off for me.
This happened to me recently with a Sanderson novel. Granted that's one guy playing with his own material, not a bunch of artists maneuvering around each of their works.
My memory is that I had the opposite impression - at least for a while I expected Thrawn to win in order to explain how the capital world got so trashed from what was depicted in Heir to the Empire.
Either way it was amusing to go from no depictions of events after RotJ to two conflicting ones.
Yeah, the timeline wasn't clear to me at the time, I wasn't sure if they were conflicting takes. It was early enough that canon wasn't as much of an expectation for me, or even a consideration yet. I was just happy for more Star Wars.
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I assumed it wasn’t until JEDI ACADEMY that a reader would understand they were part of the same story
That and a later reference Leia has to "my third child" might be the only explicit things to reference Zahn's books within the comic pages.
The tidbit about the original intent for the chronology is new to me, thanks for sharing that.
It would have been a lot more liberating creatively for all sides then and future writers following that.
Did you think that Thrawn was going to win?
Either way it was amusing to go from no depictions of events after RotJ to two conflicting ones.