Take Her Away: Disney / Marvel To Take Star Wars License From Dark Horse

A long time ago (sometime around 1986) in a galaxy far, far away (presuming you are reading this from somewhere in Andromeda, and if you are: please send flying cars and jetpacks), Marvel Comics decided, four years after Return of The Jedi had left theaters and with enthusiasm for Star Wars dwindling after years of no word of a fourth movie forthcoming, to stop publishing Star Wars comic books.

A less long time ago (figure around 1991), writer Timothy Zahn published a Star Wars novel named Heir to The Empire, which rumor had it was authorized by George Lucas and reflective of the plots originally planned for the Star Wars Episode VII movie promised to us back around 1980. The book and its sequels were a hit, and revitalized interest in Star Wars for the first time in years. And by the end of that year, we walked into comic stores to find Dark Empire, the first new Star Wars comic book in about five years, written by Tom Veitch and drawn by Cam Kennedy, expanding on Zahn’s work and published by Dark Horse Comics. This began a run of Dark Horse-published Star Wars comics that have spanned two decades, three new Star Wars movies, and, depending on your point of view and impulse control, four to six George Lucas childhood rapes (depending on if you count the non-Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoons.

A couple weeks ago, in Los Angeles, Disney bought Lucasfilm. And you might remember that three years ago, Disney bought Marvel Comics. And yet, to this day, Dark Horse publishes several Star Wars comic books (including reprints of many of the old Marvel issues). But hey, that’s okay! What could possibly happen? I mean, look at Star Wars itself! When Senator Palpatine took over the Senate, everything stayed a-ok and the status quo was maintained, right?

Right?

(cue Darth Vader’s Imperial March)

Questionable Mental States: Daredevil #21 Review

Editor’s Note: Kingpin left me with ten spoilers in my pocket. I found a comics Web site that makes change.

Whether purposefully or accidentally, Marvel and writer Mark Waid have put themselves into a difficult position by putting the first chronological appearance of The Superior Spider-Man – that is, whoever Spider-Man will wind up being after the events of next week’s The Amazing Spider-Man #700 – into this week’s Daredevil #21.

Because with all the hype and anticipation surrounding what will happen with Spider-Man (as an example: once we published an article about the leak to the Internet of the ending to The Amazing Spider-Man #700, our Web traffic doubled… and we didn’t even publish the actual spoilers), what he does and how he acts in Daredevil #21 will be almost as important to readers as the story about Ol’ Hornhead. It’s kinda like casting the Octomom or John Wayne Bobbit in a porno flick; you’ll get a lot of rubberneckers not watching the thing for its intended purpose.

So even though Spider-Man’s appearance in Daredevil #21 makes complete and total sense with regards to the greater story – not only the story of some still unknown party trying to drive Matt nuts, but of Matt’s conscious decision to lighten up that goes back to Waid’s earliest issues – his appearance here, before the resolution of the current arc in Spider-Man’s home title, means the issue (not the story; there is a distinction there) has a massive, nearly crippling distraction that I doubt Waid originally intended. It makes the reading of this individual issue, during this particular point in pre-Amazing Spider-Man #700 time, an almost schizophrenic experience, where what Spider-Man does and says in two pages is almost, if not more, important to the comic reader than the actual Daredevil story in the preceding 18 pages.

So I’m gonna review it that way: in two parts.