Dark Horse may be losing the license for Star Wars comics at the end of this year, but publisher Mike Richardson promised they were going to give it their best effort right till the end, and it looks like that’s what they are doing: Lucasfilm has announced that the final arc of Darth Maul’s Clone Wars story will be told as a four-issue mini-series, published by Dark Horse.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is an animated television series set in the world of Star Wars; the current version has been running since 2008, but last March, Lucasfilm announced that the series would come to an end, leaving some of the storylines unfinished.
Dark Horse is picking up the thread with one of them, however. Dave Filoni, who was the showrunner for Clone Wars and now is the producer for Star Wars: Rebels, explained that the writers had done “substantial development” on the Darth Maul story when the TV series ended, so they suggested finishing the story in comics form. He continued: “The comics will be based on four finished scripts that were written for Season 6. These scripts came out of one of our story conferences with George Lucas. As they moved through the production pipeline, they became finalized scripts with a great deal of the actual design work completed. The designs you will see, the plot lines, and character development in these comic books are all coming directly from the TV production. I turned over all of the art to Dark Horse so they could create an accurate representation of what we were planning for the show.”
The comic will be written by Star Wars comics veteran Jeremy Barlow, and the first issue will be out in April. Given the switch in media, Barlow says “We’re making these as new-reader-friendly as possible, understanding that some folks will be coming to this series without prior knowledge of the television show.”
A former book editor and newspaper reporter, Brigid Alverson started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters¹ reading habits and now covers comics and graphic novels for Comic Book Resources , School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics World, Robot 6, and MTV Geek. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Brigid was a judge for the 2012 Eisner Awards. Send her an email to wordballoons@gmail.com
