We spoke with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic writer John Jackson Miller about his contribution to the Star Wars galaxy, and a great many other things. Read on and may the force be with you!
Dark Horse: Tell us about your earliest memories of Star Wars. Have you always been a big fan of the movies and the franchise or more of a casual observer of the Galaxy?
John Jackson Miller: Ironically, I read the comics adaptation before I saw the movie--and that was when the movie had already been out for some months. We were having a hard time getting into the theater, even well after it had come out. Once I remember it was sold out, and I had to go see Pete's Dragon instead. I've held a grudge against Helen Reddy ever since!
So Star Wars #1 was the first "grown-up" comic book I ever got--and a couple of yeas later when I had gotten bored with kiddie comics, it was Archie Goodwin's run on the series that got me buying the series regularly. It was the first title I ever tried to collect all of--though it wouldn't be the last!
DH: In a recent issue of Comics Buyers Guide, Maggie Thompson announced that you've left the staff to write comics and video games full time. Tell us about the shift from office drone to freelance hermit, how smooth was the transition?
JJM: Heh! Hermit is right. What I had been doing was managing the websites for fifty different magazines, everything from comics to antiques to hunting--so I'd deal with dozens of people in person in a typical day. Now it's mostly me and my characters!
But I've done my best to keep my lines to the outside world open. I had already been active on darkhorse.com's message boards and blogging on my personal site www.farawaypress.com and on the Lucasfilm site (www.blogs.starwars.com/johnjacksonmiller)--but I also launched a site, The Comics Chronicles www.comichron.com so I could stay in touch with people who were interested in my historical research about comics. It's kind of funny--comics collecting had been my hobby, and then it became my job--and now it's my hobby again! Only, this time, writing comics is the job . . . or part of it!
DH: You're well into your second year as writer of our Star Wars series Knights of the Old Republic. What put you on our and Lucasfilm's radar?
JJM: I literally walked through the door. I was in Oregon for a family reunion in 2004, and chanced to visit the folks I knew at Dark Horse. I was still resting up after finishing a year of writing Iron Man for Marvel, but I was looking to pick up a fill-in issue here or there to keep active. Randy Stradley suggested pitching for Star Wars: Empire, which I did--the result being #35, which I had pitched as being "a detective story . . . with Darth Vader as the detective"!
There were other pitches there which included similar role-reversals, including one in which Luke would have to pose as Han, essentially putting a Jedi into the role of a scoundrel. And when he asked me to consider something set in the Old Republic for a new series, that formed the nucleus of--trivia here--"Renegade," which was my original working title for what would become Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement. A would-be Jedi in the service of a would-be scoundrel!
DH: How has it been working with Dark Horse and Lucasfilm?
JJM: It's been a pleasure. Jeremy Barlow, Dave Marshall, Sue Rostoni, Randy, and everybody else behind the scenes have been great to work with--and just as importantly, you can really tell how much they care about what they're working on. Everybody is very committed to putting out the best work we can.
DH: How far do you have the overall KotOR story mapped out?
JJM: The general outline goes a good long ways--although it's not so much a rigid structure as it is a notion of what mysteries will be resolved, and in what order.
I grew up in the Chris Claremont era of X-Men comics, where there were dozens of subplots that would take years to resolve--and while sometimes I'd get impatient, I always knew that he knew the answers to the mysteries he'd posed, and that we'd get them eventually. I'm trying to make sure I always know the answers too--and while there are ones that will take longer to resolve, I am trying to mix things up a bit by resolving some mysteries quickly.
We got Lucien's origin story right in the first year, for example. And going forward, we will, for example, know why Camper is the most hunted man in the Old Republic by the end of #18--and as for a meeting between Zayne and his murderous masters, well, let's just say it might be coming sooner than you think . . .
John Jackson Miller signing at the Dark Horse booth!
DH: Let's address the uninitiated reader here, someone who's a fan of the Star Wars trilogies but, for some strange reason, has yet to read any of our comics. Perhaps they worry that the current Star Wars continuity might be a bit much to dive into. Why should they give Knights of the Old Republic a shot?
JJM: The core dilemma of Knights of the Old Republic is a very simple one that fans who have seen nothing but the movies should be able to plug into right away.
Unlike the films where a Jedi student betrayed his master, here, a Jedi student--and a poor one, at that--was betrayed by his masters, and blamed for the murders they committed. His quest to find out why is resolved in Commencement, the first trade paperback-but it's at that point that his second quest begins: getting someone to believe the truth.
And this is a quest that has already taken him across the galaxy--and that will take him still further, in a cat-and-mouse game with the Masters whom he has sworn to bring to justice, one way or another. It gets into questions about destiny. If someone could have stopped Anakin Skywalker before he fell, what would they have been justified in doing? And what would Anakin have been justified in doing in response?
So there are big questions like these--but also, the series delves into personalities in a way that I think will be familiar to the fans of the films, where the characters were really thrown together initially against their wills. We see in Knights of the Old Republic that, as effective as our heroes may sometimes be when they work together, they don't always have the same goals or ideas about how to go about things. And they have no qualms about expressing those differences--verbally or non-verbally!
DH: When it comes to writing Star Wars, it seems like most guys and girls would kill to get their hands on the characters from the movies. Since KotOR is set some four thousand years before the films there's no chance that Luke Skywalker or Mace Windu will be walking across the stage. Do you find this lack of familiar characters in your series to be a drawback or an advantage?
JJM: In the beginning, I was going, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm going to have to make up a bunch of new characters!" Then I went, "Hey! I'm going to get to make up a bunch of new characters!"
And I think that we've done a pretty good job of creating characters whose roles will be understandable to people who are familiar with Star Wars--yet which are not just shake-and-bake versions of the originals. As someone online put it, we've got our strong-man in Elbee--but he's also greatly troubled. We have a scoundrel in Gryph--but he's as far as you can get from a dashing warrior. We don't have a princess-but there's definitely a similar sense of honor and drive in Rohlan, the Mandalorian deserter.
So it is new--and yet accessible at the same time. I owe a lot to Brian Ching, Dustin Weaver, Michael Atiyeh, Harvey Tolibao, and all the artists who've made these characters come alive.
DH: Following up on the last question, the events in KotOR take place eight years before the very popular XBox game of the same name. What is it about this specific era in Star Wars mythology that appeals to you? Do you feel that the stories you're telling in KotOR could only happen in this time period?
JJM: I like the fact that it's a chance to repeat the Original Trilogy/Prequel Trilogy experiment with some different variables. Like with the movies, we have information about what's going to happen in the future. But unlike the movies, not everybody has that knowledge, and more importantly, much of that knowledge is incomplete.
We knew who was going to turn into Darth Vader. But readers don't know who's going to turn into the various Darths from the game--nor can they be certain that any will at all. Yes, the gamers come in with some insights--but there are also some where knowing about the events of the games actually puts you at a disadvantage, compared with the readers who come in without preconceived notions. It's all been part of the plan--developing a series that would be accessible to new readers, while also serving as an interlocking piece with all the existing materials.
DH: What do you find to be the most challenging in terms of storytelling with this period of Star Wars?
JJM: Knowing what hasn't been invented or discovered yet! I already made a boo-boo with bacta, in #3, whose later origins have been established elsewhere--though we left it in the trade paperback, so I'll have to deal with that eventually. (The joke just didn't work without it!) So these are the kinds of challenges that keep me up at night . . .
But that's what's fun about it, too. In a way, the fact that our Arkanians didn't look like the Tales of the Jedi Arkanians helped point me in the direction of the story about segregation that we found in #16. I was able to say then to the sharp readers that noticed the difference that, yeah, this one we had an answer to. Unlike the bacta thing. I'll have to get bacta you on that. (Sorry! Not typical of the series humor, folks!)
DH: Beyond KotOR, what other stories in the Star Wars galaxy interest you that you would like to explore?
JJM: I've got some more movie-era material in me. Among other things, I'd like another swing at the Imperial Navy--it's such a different animal from the Republic Navy we have in KotOR. I'm a big fan of Lando Calrissian and all the honesty-challenged characters of the series, as if you couldn't tell by my use of "The Gryph"!
DH: Speaking of Star Wars in more general terms, the franchise shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. If you were put in charge of steering the ship, where would like to see Star Wars go in the next, say ten-to-twenty years? Personally, would you still like to be a part of it?
JJM: I think Star Wars is in a very interesting place. Unlike when the original trilogy ended, there's this infrastructure in place to guarantee a steady supply of new material from various media--and there are varying "flavors" of it, since the timeline is progressing in several areas at once. The comics, the novels, the games--everything's playing a role in keeping the story moving ahead.
What that means is that the brand, as the business folks put it, should be able to keep refreshing and reinventing itself for a good long while to come. I mean, there's centuries and centuries of nothing in front of the one that I'm working in--and I expect to be in 3963 BBY for a good while yet!
And, yes, I'd certainly like to be involved with it, so long as I still have stories to tell that people want to read. That would all go toward a goal in life that I share with the great Tom Lehrer: "the prolonging of adolescence beyond all previously known limits"!
DH: Aside from Star Wars, what does the future hold for John Jackson Miller professionally? Do you have any other projects waiting in the wings?
JJM: I'm writing for Sword of the New World, which is an online role-playing game that's popular in its native Korea--I've spent the spring working with the translations and creating new material for it. I also have some other fiction lined up that I can't yet discuss, not all of it in comics.
On the non-fiction side, I'm contributing to next year's Overstreet Price Guide and continuing to opine semi-regularly in my "Longbox Manifesto" column in Comics Buyer's Guide. I'll also be working to further develop the archive of historical sales figure data that's on The Comics Chronicles. I have so much data from my lifetime of collecting so far, it may take a similar amount of time to get it all online where people can use it!
DH: You're attending Star Wars Celebration, commemorating thirty years of Star Wars. (Has it really been thirty years?) What do you enjoy most out of attending these kinds of conventions?
JJM: I enjoy the signings, which has been a relatively new phenomenon for me since I started writing four years ago. It's nice to talk to people one-on-one--and there's always that person who makes your day, who really gets what you're trying to do. Sometimes more than one!
But I'm also a big panel guy--I do about five a year at my hometown show, Midsouthcon. (It would have helped this past year if my voice was working, but never mind.) I also give a lot of seminars I do at cons--I have hours that I do on collecting, on comics history, on writing. If I ever have time, I've been meaning to get a podcast going one day before I forget all this stuff.
We spoke with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Writer John Jackson Miller about his contribution to the Star Wars galaxy and a great many other things. Read on and may the force be with you!
About the only thing I don't get into is the costume thing. I dressed up for my very first convention--allegedly as Indiana Jones--and was mistaken for an armed accountant. So much for that . . .
DH: Is it true you own a metric ton of comics?
JJM: No idea--although I should warn future homeowners that books can be a serious load on a floor. And I'll tell you that while having a big library sounds like a good thing to have, you think twice when you realize that (a) they're not worth anything because you've read them to tatters, and (b) you'll probably never be able to move ever again. But then, nobody really owns comics, anyway--like cats, they own us!