Alright, so there I am, a guy who just shut down the biggest thing he did in his spare time that is star wars related. Now I have two bookshelves that are 6 feet tall each filled with star wars novels and RPG books, and no hobby that is going to have me actually using them. What should I do? How about make a Fan Comic?

I used to run NSU, at www.swnsu.com. It was a fairly large sim, (An online RPG maxi-campaign that allows for many many users to play at once, without the aid of a GM. The main difference between an RPG and a Sim is that in a sim, players make their own storylines instead of depending on a GM to craft the story) boasting 1000 player characters at it's height. That project forced me to read ALL the star wars books (oh the horror!) so that I could research all of the various weapons and vehicles for use in my game.

Now, after running this game for 8 years on and off, I had finally decided it wasn't worth the effort, and that I would do best to walk away. Fine. I walked. Now what? I still loved star wars more than ever (bad prequel movies aside) and I wanted a unique way to express my love for the saga.

Concurrently, I had found myself spending a lot of time posting on the Dark Horse Comics forums under the NarCranor forum handle. I had made a few threads suggesting story topics for future comics, another thread that grew quite popular called "42 Clone Wars Loose Ends" in effort to inform the Dark Horse staff about obscure continuity references to the clone wars that they could perhaps give a continuity hug to during the course of a comic or two.

It was between looking at all my now less useful Star Wars literature collection and being a pain on the Dark Horse forums that I came up with the idea that hey, Ive read 60+ comics a month for the past 14 years. I know a lot about comics. I might as well just write my own Fan Comic. Aha! Triumph! My life has a focus once again! Now just to figure out what to write a comic about, and what I have to say about it.

I started by looking at my life experiences, and what I would be able to write about in Star Wars where I could lend a unique voice and life experience. Being that I was previously a Naval Intelligence Specialist at Naval Space Command, Dahlgren, Virginia, I thought that I would probably be one of the most qualified people on the planet to tell a story about competing Intelligence organizations in the galaxy far, far away.

With this idea in hand, I went to the Star Wars Artist's Guild website. This was a wonderful site where fan artists were able to post a wide array of fan art. Most of their posts were requests from people who wanted drawings of their RPG characters. Most of this art is done in a style very similar to the standard comic book. So I diligently browsed through all of the artists and emailed about 30 of them with the offer to draw a comic that I want to write, and what my basic idea was for our story. I only received a reply from about 10 people, 7 of which claimed to be far too busy with paying work to do something like my paltry fan comic. Fair enough. However, there were 2-3 who did express some interest. The one I clicked with the most, however, was Steve Criado. He also happened to be one of the more talented artists of the 30 I had emailed. Lucky me!

So Steve and I began to collaborate on what our story would be, he began sketching characters while I was doing character write-ups and plotting out the story. I quickly crafted a script for the first issue along with a page by page outline for the other 3 issues in the mini series. The 88 pages will take Steve as long as 2-3 years to draw completely (we have 6 and a half done right now! )

Now the fun part was in deciding what obscure characters from the EU to bring into my story. We decided to have General Airen Cracken (often referenced in WEG products and some novels) be our rebel intelligence unit leader, and Ysanne Isard represent the Imperials (most famous for antagonizing Rogue Squadron in the novels and comics). However, there are quite a few other characters that are MUCH more obscure that made it into the first issue.

The comic will have appearances from characters from a lot of obscure WEG sources, old video games like Rebel Assault II, childrens novels (prophets of the dark side specifically), the Xwing novels, the Xwing Comics, and all sorts of other obscure long-forgotten sources like the marvel comics .

So now that my life is focused on something star wars again, Ive been writing the fan comics, writing fan fiction that goes back and tells the origins of some of the characters in the fan comic. We have D20 RPG supplements that provide stats and bios for the various characters in the comic, and we should soon start having some CCG, TCG, and Minis cards of the characters in the comic. So its really a multi-media blitz. The project is called Cracken's Crew, and I'm very excited about what we have managed to accomplish so far, and what is coming in the near future.

Thus far we have pretty much managed to stay pretty close to our update schedule (we update every friday) and have even had three celebrity visitors! Dan Wallace (writes some of the reference books), Patricia Jackson (wrote the brandl short stories for the star wars adventure journals), and Ann Crispin (wrote the new han solo trilogy) have all given the site a peek. It lent my little fan project a certain degree of legitimacy in my eyes.

In any case, if any of you want to check the site out, check out Cracken's Crew