I like vintage Star Wars comics.


You may find that this is probably not a remarkable statement. Actually, it's not a remarkable statement, and it also is not what this blog is about. This blog is about



THE POWER OF CANON-OLOGY.



You are probably wondering what vintage Star Wars comics has to do with



THE POWER OF CANON-OLOGY,



so I will explain it to you. Sound good?

(You might also be wondering why I repeated



THE POWER OF CANON-OLOGY



Three times in a row in all caps, italics, bolded and underlined. I will explain this too. So keep reading.)

I own two or three vintage Star Wars comics. By "vintage" I mean "comics that are old, but not necessarily valuable." And it is true that these comics are not particularly valuable, at least from a monetary standpoint. But the value they do hold is that, while flipping through them a while ago, they led me to a very interesting question...

"Who decides what is made canon, and what is not?"

And...

"When something is canon, who decides when to make it un-canon?"

The reason vintage comics led me to these questions is because--as many of the people who own or have read them will attest to--they contain some very unusual things that do not necessarily make sense in the EU.

A purple jack-rabbit with a strange name I will not mention, and a personality frighteningly similar to Buggs Bunny in a spacesuit, makes an appearance in at least two (2) comics that I know of. Or it might be one (1); I'm not sure. Why is this even remotely relevant, you ask?

Because talking purple space-rabbits don't really... What's the word?... Blend with the Star Wars universe.

Of course, this was all at a time when Star Wars and it's Expanded Universe had no real established unspoken rules about what is and is not allowed, or that anything placed in them will have any long-lasting value, to be passed down from story to story (as happened to be the case with randomly selected characters like Shira Brie.)

This is also very apparent in the dreaded Christmas Special, (which I will henceforth refer to as the C.S.) in which things happen that have absolutely no visible bearing on the Star Wars EU as we know it today; and luckily so, because there are things about the dreaded C.S. that we do not want in the EU.

And yet, at the same time, we have things that very definitively (and irrevocably) ARE part of the EU. For example, the name of Chewbacca's son, or the appearance of Boba Fett and his role as a bounty hunter; both having appeared first to the public in the C.S..

Did these things originate in the C.S., as with Lumpy's name? Or were they things pre-decided to be, like Boba Fett?

Let me show you a slightly more relevant and interesting example.

In the Boba Fett trilogy, made up of Hard Merchandise, Slave Ship, and The Mandalorian Armor (the author's name escapes me, but I want to say Aaron Alston) we are told some interesting things about Boba Fett. One of these things is that Kaut Drive Yards built the Slave I for Fett, and Fett later had them, as I recall, 'discontinue' the line so as to make his ship unique. The implication is that there are more Firespray-class ships flying around the universe, albeit rare and next-to-impossible to find.

And then come the prequel trilogies. In Episode II, we see Jango Fett's ship, the Slave I, engage in a tremendous dogfight with Obi-Wan's Jedi starfighter. First reaction? "Cool!"

Second reaction?

"Wait a minute..."

And then, a short time later, (or was it before) in the game Bounty Hunter, detailing the highlights of Jango Fett's career we see Jango Fett not only in posession of the Slave I long before it was presumably commissioned by Boba Fett, but we also see him steal it from a hangar and the destroy all copies.

meaning that unless others were built by a nameless source and in small quantities afterwards, there is only one Firespray-class ship in existence.


We now have two versions of the story.


Most often, I find that events detailed in video games usually don't overwrite pre-existing canon.

...Unless, of course, they're treated that as canon by someone else.

Like, say, Karen Traviss, who is now our semi-resident expert on all things clone and Mandalorian. And while we're on the subject of Ms. Traviss, has anyone thought to ask her what made her decide to take a small comic about Boba Fett's wife and child, written from the Star Wars Tales series (which are decidedly un-canon, and very clearly labeled so) and turn it into That Which Is Star Wars Fact? Yes, there is the continuity department of Lucasarts, or Lucasbooks, or wherever they are; so surely someone somewhere must have ok'd this. People can't just find stuff and make canon.

So are non-canon stories now suddenly ripe picking grounds for other writers to select at whim and say, "I like that, I'm using it"? (Again, Shira Brie.)

So how did a detailed trilogy written years before the prequels suddenly become discounted as incorrect, without even so much as a sheepish grin or a "whoopsie"?

That's because George Lucas has the power.

He made the movies before we made the books, toys, comics, TV shows, video games, and random what-have-you. Therefore, he gets to decide if anything that comes after his movies will be in his movies, as is the case with the prequels. When George Lucas makes a movie, we don't question it. It just is. Jango Fett was the first owner of the Slave I, not Boba. And no matter how much literature preceded the prequels, and no matter how contradictory it may seem, this is Star Wars fact and will be Star Wars fact as long as there is Star Wars.

If he wants to make a trilogy about the life of Bing Bing the mentally handicapped Ewok, it becomes so, and we must, by the Unspoken Rules, accept it.

George Lucas either didn't know about the contents of the Boba Fett trilogy, or he was not particularly concerned about them. I suspect a mixture of both. Regardless, what he says, goes. His movies are the trump card to anything that comes after them, and if he wants to make new ones that change what's already established, he will.

But only to an extent.

Translation: George Lucas's powers are limited.

You see, by the time the prequels came along, quite a bit of the EU had been built up, mainly by the novels. Thrawn, Lando Calrissian's early past, (don't even get me started on all the droid-rules Vuffi-Ra breaks) and random tidbit characters like the before-mentioned Shira Brie had already become, by an unspoken yet universally-understood rule, a fabric of the Star Wars universe. Nobody was really expecting another trilogy, so nobody really had to think that what they were writing might one day interfere with George Lucas's future plans.

George's movies are the trump card...most of the time.

But when are they not?

And when are our decisions more powerful than the Big Man himself?

Or what about when our canon shoves its way into his movies?


...Stay tuned for part two of "What Makes It Canon"!



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For those that are wondering about the triple repetition of "The Power of Canon-ology," it is because I find that sometimes you have to say something 3 times before a lot of people take you seriously. It's something I learned on the kindergarten playground.