Entry 304: Blast From The Past - Part 27

So after the King Kong comic I jumped onto Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. We're going back to 2006 in this Blast From The Past Entry. 


I came into Star Wars with a lot of ideas about HOW Star Wars SHOULD be done. Number 1: You gotta keep showing people something new. New vehicles, new aliens, new places. Always be creative. #2: designs should make cool toys. (I actually always think this for everything.) #3 There are countless little rules for designing Star Wars things. For instance-- wheels. Don't use em. Use robot legs. There are a lot more rules like that. Point is, I was thinking about all of it. #4... Actually most of my other ideas fall into the realm of writing, witch was out of my control. Suffice it to say, I came into Star Wars feeling like I was going to show everyone how it's done. In a healthy way though, not an asshole way. I'm into a sense of friendly competition. I don't know if the people I'm competing with ever know that we're in a competition... but we are. Oh... we are.

My first issue was #7. Here are some more pages from that issue.



  

All the colors in this post are by Michael Atiyeh.

With that big droid guy, he'd been designed for the series already, but I wanted to flesh out the design in my own way. I recycled some elements from a design I did for a short comic pitch called Blue Birds. You can find that in Entry-199 Blast From The Past Part-14

Next, issue 8

 

The nice thing about creating original aliens and things like that is that I could reference my own creations in subtle ways to kind of build my own Star Wars continuum. In this issue a slipped in background aliens I had drawn in my Star Wars Tales issues, and the great thing was, the fans found them. For a detail oriented creator like me, having fans really pay attention was rewarding and fun.

Throughout my time working on Star Wars comics I found the fans on the message boards to be really great. Later I would work on my first X-Men related comic and find a totally different, and less appealing fan scene. It feels like, in recent years, the Star Wars fandom has shifted into that dark side. Maybe it comes with getting too much of what you want. It turns fandom unhealthy.

I went all out on issues 7 and 8 and fell behind schedule. The next issue was suposed to be #9, but it got pushed back to being issue 10. It was lucky that there was a stand alone issue they could put in it's place.

So my next issue was #10. This is also the last issue I'll talk about in this post.

 

John Jackson Miller's scripts were fun to work on. They included a range of different kinds of moments, dramatic, comedic, visually driven, dialogue driven. They were fun comics to make.

How bout some sketches?

It's hard trying to decide what sketches to scan. There are pages where everything is unusable except for one small design that I liked. So, I'm not scanning everything.

These first sketches are for the miners and the mining sight at the start of issue 7.

 Part of the challenge was taking designs from old comics that didn't fit my idea of Star Wars aesthetic and making them fit in more.

In the second image you can see a small sketch of the interior layout of The Last Resort, the main ship used by the heroes. This ship was already designed but the interior layout wasn't totally clear. I looked at everything that had come before to determine a solid idea of it, and did a few sketches like this. Later I would have the chance to do an official cross-section piece for this.

In the Knights of the Old Republic video games the Mandalorians basically had a uniform look. That makes sense for a video game, but it doesn't really make sense for what the Mandalorians were supposed to be, as far as I could tell. I came to think of them as space pirates who are a bunch of Rocketeers. A uniform look doesn't really say "pirate." They also recruit all kinds of aliens. How can they even have a uniform look? So I decided not to do it. This actually became a story element in the series. As the Mandalorian War goes on, they become more uniform. It worked because our comic took place before the games.

That's it for now.

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