For more than a decade now, John Ostrander (writer of legendary works like Grimjack and Suicide Squad) has been one of the key writers of Dark Horse’s Star Wars comic books. He’s created characters like Quinlan Vos and Aayla Secura — the latter proving so popular with George Lucas that he worked her into two films. He’s told tales of the far future of the franchise in Star Wars: Legacy, and with longtime collaborator Jan Duursema, he’ll head back to its beginnings with Dawn of the Jedi in 2012.
This week, Ostrander’s other iron in the Star Wars fire launched: Agent of the Empire: Iron Eclipse, a five-issue mini-series detailing the exploits of Jahan Cross, a secret agent in the service of Imperial intelligence, set during the Original Trilogy. You can read a preview — and dig Stephane Roux‘s amazing art — at Dark Horse’s website, and to hear Ostrander’s thoughts on the series, you need but only read on after the jump.
After more than a decade of Star Wars stories, what is it about your take on the universe that you think people respond to? Or, to put it a slightly different way, to some hypothetical fan who knows the George Lucas stuff, what does the John Ostrander stuff have that they can’t get anywhere else in the Expanded Universe?
John Ostrander: I try to make it feel like Star Wars without making it a re-hash of Star Wars. I like to create characters that fit into Star Wars but you don’t know what their fates are, as you do with Luke, Anakin, and so on. It’s about story and about character and I try to create (usually with my artist Jan Duursema) a myriad of interesting, complex characters all of whom are capable of generating stories. I’m not saying you can’t get that anywhere else in the EU; I know you can. I think it’s the new characters that we create that really sells the stories
Speaking of the Expanded Universe — how attuned are you to the shape of the entire thing? Agent of the Empire is a spy-actioner, for example. Are you at all conscious of whether or not other EU comics (or novels, or computer games, or blah blah blah) fill that kind of niche within the greater Star Wars amalgam when you decide what kind of story you want to tell, or what genre you want to inflect your work with?
JO: Whether working with Jan on our upcoming Dawn of the Jedi or working with Stephane Roux on Agent of the Empire, I’m primarily looking for setting, situations, and characters that will generate good stories. You can make yourself crazy trying to come up with a new “spin”. At the same time, you want to do something that hasn’t been done to death, either. I’m pretty aware of the books, games, and other comics so certainly I try to avoid doing what they’re doing or even doing what we’ve done before.
Returning to the idea of AotE as a spy-actioner — where did that idea come from in the first place? My Star Wars knowledge isn’t the most comprehensive, but I can’t think of many similar examples — so I’m curious how a new (or new-ish, or halfway new) idea gets coded into the Star Wars content machine, what sort of inspiration guides it, what sort of hurdles keep it in check, and so on.
JO: I was looking for another series in addition to the Dawn of the Jedi series and I was talking with my editor, Randy Stradley. There wasn’t really anything planned in the era of the Original Trilogy. Part of the reason is that so much had been done there that it’s really hard not to trip over existing continuity. Seeing things from an Imperial viewpoint might give us a different perspective, I thought, but Dark Horse had already done Empire which had that kind of focus.
I’m fond of what I call “narrative alloys” — mashing-up one genre with another. (I love genre fiction.) My own character, Grimjack, had started as a narrative alloy of hard-boiled detectives and sword-and-sorcery stories. So I thought of Star Wars and how could I blend it with something else I liked. I love espionage stories and films and so it struck me — “James Bond meets Star Wars”. The two genres actually complement one another with several tropes in common — multiple exotic locales, charismatic protagonist, gadgets, big time villains, chases, beautiful females and so on.
Continued belowThe main thing is — more than James Bond it has to be STAR WARS. It has to feel like Star Wars, it has to LOOK like Star Wars. That’s the trick. We’ll see if I managed it. I think I have.
Jahan Cross, the titular Agent of the Empire and Imperial intelligence officer, seems of a piece with the characters you’ve written throughout your career — tough, masculine, competent, with a storied-but-untold past and just a touch of black humor smudging his edges. Aside from the obvious hook of “Star Wars secret agent,” what sets him apart and makes him the anchor of AotE in a way that another character couldn’t be?
JO: We’re asking you to identify with a character that is solidly Imperial and we’ve been told that the Empire is evil. I don’t lay out everything about him right away. You’ll know some things about him in this story but more will be revealed in the next arc. He has his own codes and a big question what happens when the requirements of a mission clash with that code. What will he do and what is the cost?
I’m mostly familiar with Stephane Roux from his work at DC — stuff that would have made me guess that he’d be working on… let’s call it a more Twi’lek-heavy book. He knocks it out of the park in AotE #1, though — art that’s clear and powerful, with the sleekness and motion that a good secret-agent story needs. How did the process of collaborating with him to design the milieu of the story and characters work? Obviously, the “look” of Star Wars is a fairly well-defined one, but surely there must have been enough elasticity for the both of you to play with it a bit.
JO: I love what Stephane is doing and I think his designs are first rate. We’ve met in person and we’ve talked (at C2E2 in Chicago earlier this year) and we write back and forth. I try to give him descriptions and as much detail as I can but I’m not the artist. Stephane is the one who has to draw it. I generally get designs and I may have notes that I send back but I don’t see Stephane (or any artist I work with) as my “hands”. I always want what they can bring to the party and Stephane brings quite a bit. And don’t worry; Stephane gets a chance to ‘draw sexy’ in upcoming issues. I had to do that. He’s French.
The most unexpected part of AotE #1 — to me, anyway — was the extended guest appearance by Han Solo and Chewbacca. Going back to the earlier idea of fitting each piece of Star Wars canon into a greater whole, how does that sort of guest spot work? Is there someone sending you e-mails that say, to use a hypothetical example, “Well, actually, John, you can’t have Han mention him and Chewie flying in from Alderaan, because in so-and-so’s novel, at this time Han was actually returning from Ryloth, and…”
JO: When I conceived of the story, I did my research to see if I could use Han and Chewie and the Falcon the way that I’m using them according to continuity. I then present it to Lucas Film Licensing (who okays everything) and find out if I can do it. Then I have to make sure that the way I write Han and Chewie sound and act the way they would at that time. Actually, it’s fun.
Of all your other work, AotE reminds me most of Suicide Squad, which I will not hesitate to point out is one of my favorite comics ever made. The mixture of action, under-the-table political and industrial scheming, diverse characters, and gallows humor — with new attention being put toward the Squad with Adam Glass’s New-52 series and new TPBs of your own run [Note: This interview took place before this article was posted], is this something conscious, or a happy accident that I’m reading too much into?
JO: More of a happy accident. I write the way that I write. I don’t think I was aware of any new plans for the Squad when I started Agent of the Empire.
Finally, what is it that keeps us reading Star Wars comics (and watching Star Wars cartoons, and building Star Wars Lego sets, and buying umpteen re-released Blu-Rays, and…)? In your experience as a purveyor of goods from a galaxy far, far away, what is it that the people respond to, and keeps them coming back again and again?
JO: It’s myth, one created for our times and reflecting them. Like any myth, we bring something of ourselves to it and invest it with ourselves. It’s part of the reason, I think, that so many fans think of Star Wars as “theirs”. George Lucas has created a wonderful sandbox and then allowed people like me to come in and play in it.
