The Road to Episode Infinity: My Interview with John Jackson Miller

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.

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.