John
Jackson Miller has written dozens of Star Wars stories including Comics,
Novels, and eBooks. I know him best from the 52 issue “Knights of the Old
Republic” comic series, which is sort of his Magnum Opus. Other fans might have
read his best-selling 2013 novel, “Kenobi” or his 2014 work “A New Dawn”.
Miller
is a life-long Star Wars fan and has written Star Wars media for over a dozen
years. He has also written for the Star Trek, Halo, and Planet of the Apes
franchises, and was the lead writer for Marvel's Iron Man in the early 2000s. I had a
chance to meet John Jackson Miller in person at the Portage Country Library this
weekend- and I got to ask him a couple of questions.
Me-
Can you talk about the creation of Rae Sloan?
JJM- Rae Sloan begins in
“New Dawn” as the captain of one of the Imperial Star Destroyers. She was
entirely mine. There are various cases where characters will be given to you
and certain characters will be suggested to you. Actually when I went out to
Lucasfilm, I said “This is going to be your running character”… Rae Sloan is
essentially a believer in the Empire. Not a believer in the Sith stuff-
remember most of the Empire do not know anything about the Sith or the Jedi,
most of them believe that they are just trying to run the republic in a more
orderly way, they’re trying to put to rest all of the horrible things that
happened to the Republic during the Clone Wars… They all think they’re heroes;
they all think they’re doing a good job; they all think that they’re doing the
right thing. [Sloan] is really part of that first class of what would have been
the Republic’s Navy’s graduates when the Empire starts- and she is trying to
find her way through the politics of the Empire, because it’s very clear to her
as she goes along that there is this dog-eat-dog thing happening underneath the
Emperor where everyone is trying to curry favor to the Emperor and at the same
time the Emperor is trying to play everyone off against each other because
that’s the way he stays in power and in “New Dawn” we get to see her learning
to play that game… I like writing about the line officers, the people who live
in the world, and may not necessarily be the most important character, but we
see what it’s like to live in that Imperial Navy.
Me-
If you could chose one of your older characters to bring into the new Disney
canon, who would you chose?
JJM- This one’s complicated
because most of what I’ve written was in the “way back”, it’s been in the
“distant past”. I’m always happy to think that the story I wrote for “The Knights
of the Old Republic” could easily have taken place during the Clone Wars where
instead of the [Jedi] worried about [Darth] Revan and the rise of everything
that happens in the video games, the [Jedi] are worried about the Clone Wars
and the rise of The Empire. That story could easily be transported forward, if
that were the case I would be happy to write a Gryph novel for free. Gryph was
the con-artist that was Zayne Carrick’s sidekick through the “Knights of the
Old Republic” series. The fans in Memphis kept wanting to costume me as one of
my characters, and I kept refusing because I don’t wear a costume well… so I
said I don’t want a costume but bring me a Gryph costume because I knew Gryph
was three feet tall. So I came back to the convention the next year and they
had a life-size Gryph muppet that I had to haul around for the entire
convention.
-At
this point another fan asks an annoying question about the “Who Shot First”
controversy, which John Jackson Miller responded to quite elegantly-
Fan: How do you feel about the whole “Who Shot First” and the fact that George [Lucas] has changed the old Star Wars.
Fan: How do you feel about the whole “Who Shot First” and the fact that George [Lucas] has changed the old Star Wars.
JJM- The way I look at it,
“Han Shoots First” is the better story point, because the reason that they have
Han shoot first is that they wanted to establish that he was tough, that he
smart and he was clever. It’s not like Greedo was not going to kill him anyway.
That’s why they did that. George chose to go a different direction with it. The
thing is- it’s whatever he wants because it’s his. This has been the thing that
I’ve never understood with “The People Versus George Lucas” or whatever. I may
not like what the creators do to their own characters. Even Peter Jackson
recognized that the “Scouring of the Shire” had no place in “The Lord of the
Rings”. It was a last chapter that was tacked on. You read the “Lord of the
Rings” and you have all this wonderful stuff happening and then there’s this
really dumb story at the end where we find out what really happened to Saruman
and Grimer Wormtongue. And it’s tacked on and it’s dippy… on the other hand I
don’t deny that it was what Tolkien intended to do… You have to give the
creators their space. At the same time you’re under no obligation to accept
their interpretation of their own characters.
I’ve always said the Aliens
movies stopped after the second Aliens movie. “Aliens 3” never happened in my
world. “Alien Resurrection” never happened in my world. There’s no movie
between “Rocky 3” and “Rocky Balboa”. We just sort of gloss over it. Except
then they put out “Creed” which is a good movie and it forces me to have to
accept “Rocky 4” into my personal canon, but I won’t take “Rocky 5”, I’m sorry,
but I won’t take “Rocky 5”. We all have our own personal canon.
Canon came from religion to
begin with and the term got to us through Sherlock Holmes. Because the Sherlock
Holmes fans were trying to make sense of the fact that Author Conan Doyle was
writing this character’s stories in magazines coming out a month at a time just
trying to pay his bills and he paid no attention whatsoever to how many times
Doctor Watson had been married. He paid absolutely no attention to what Doctor
Watson’s first name was, so it goes between “John” and “James”. Watson got like
eight different wives. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the fans had the
free time to sit around with these novels and put those stories in order. And
they say “This must be what really happened” and they figured out there must be
seven wives and this one died of this and this one died of this and this one
died of this. And James must be his middle name and it’s a first world problem.
It’s wonderful that we love
these stories so much that we want to compose our own reality or our own
thinking about these things, but it’s also the reason why that it’s impossible
for fans of novels or comics or games to evaluate those movies as movies.
Because we don’t go to the movies to see those movies we are going to “go to
church”. We’re going to see the “holy words” of Tolkien or Stan Lee or George
Lucas… The world has kind of gone haywire in that sense in that we are worrying
about whether Han shot first. Did Han shoot first or not? It depends on the
version of the movie you are watching.
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| John Jackson Miller with "Gryph" A Year of Star Wars Books "Aftermath Trilogy" by Chuck Wendig "A New Dawn" by Jonathan Jackson Miller "Thrawn" by Timothy Zahn "Lost Stars" by Claudia Gray "Knight Errant" by Jonathan Jackson Miller "Bloodline" by Claudia Gray "Ahsoka" by E. K. Johnston "Before the Awakening" by Greg Rucka "Kenobi" by John Jackson Miller "Phasma" by Delilah S Dawson "From A Certain Point of View" "Cobalt Squadron" by Elizabeth Wein http://roadto7.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-last-jedi-expanded-universe.html |
