Art from SWL #6

Dark Horse Comics

The only thing that kept me writing about the 30th anniversary of Star Wars was pure fear in coming off as even more of a total geek than just the comic geek. Loves comics and Star Wars? Strike Two! But I do love Star Wars. I read the old Marvel series religiously, picked up a lot of the Dark Horse stuff and have enjoyed most of the novels. But I wasn’t a huge fan of the Old Republic- and Prequel-era comics. There were a couple of gems in there (and this creative team did some great work on a bunch of them), but I’ve always been the type of person to want to know what happens NEXT. With Legacy, the Star Wars story goes forward 100 years past the events in the current Star Wars novels or, more precisely, 137 years after the Episode IV: A New Hope.

Ostrander has done an incredible job in creating a new universe for these characters. Gone is the Sith rule of two where there can only be a master and an apprentice. The evil Sith Lord Darth Krayt has dozens of Sith working for him. The Empire has been reborn and is more of a political power than ever before. The Jedi Order that was re-established in the post-trilogy novels seems to have been completely decimated once again. The only hope that people have comes from the one called Skywalker. Cade Skywalker. The only problem is that Cade is a pirate who abandoned his Jedi teachings and has gone out for himself. He doesn’t want to acknowledge, let alone embrace, his legacy. Continue reading “Star Wars Legacy #12: Getting a Fresh Look at Star Wars”

Most of us are familiar with the story of Frank Miller’s 300 by now if only because of the beautiful movie trailers that have been showing up recently. It is the retelling in comic form of the historic Battle of Thermopylae, where 7,000 Greek soldiers led by Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 personal guard defended Greece from an army of Persian soldiers led by King Xerxes I (estimates of the size of this army range from 200,000 to 2,000,000). Although the 300 Spartans died to the man—as well as 1,200 of their Greek allies—they defended the retreat of 5,500 other Greeks and inflicted anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 casualties on the Persian army.

The pages in this book are not standard size. Each is over twelve inches wide and over nine inches tall. The large page format is from the original comic books, which had a double page spread throughout. These spreads give Frank Miller and Lynn Varley large canvases on which to tell their stories, giving 300 one of the most original styles in all of comic art. Continue reading “300: Stylish and Powerful”