12

There, still, we have magic adventures, more wonderful than any I have told you about; but now, when we wake up in the morning, they are gone before we can catch hold of them.
The House at Pooh Corner

A barely recognizable Han Solo and Chewie in a fire-fight in some ruins. The ground is yellow with some scrubs growing on it; suggesting that we are back on Tatooine. The sky is black and studied with stars, and about a quarter of the page is taken up with a small moon -- suggesting that, on the contrary, we’re far out in space, maybe on some asteroid. [*] Chewbacca is holding the body of a green humanoid with red eyes; behind them is a guy in a red uniform and vaguely fishy features. (Forty years of staring at the page gives me no clue as to what he is holding.) Someone is firing at Han and Chewie from out of shot. Han is crying “Grab a laser gun, Chewie!” to his partner.

This is the cover of Star Wars # 7 (Star Wars Weekly #14 in the UK): the first glimpse we'd had of the Star Wars universe since the lights went up at the end of what was definitely not called A New Hope. It was reproduced on the final page of the Star Wars Treasury Edition, and I longed for it as much as I longed for Star Wars 2 and a lightsaber of my very own.

Roy Thomas evidently doesn't care too much about Star Wars lore: even at this early date, he ought to have known that Han would have said blaster rather than laser gun. We could have been looking at the cover of any sci-fi comic of the previous 50 years: good guys fighting bad guys on a faraway planet. But one detail screamed “Star Wars” at me, and still does. “WANTED: Dead or Alive Han Solo and Chewbacca the Wookie” pinned to one of the walls.

There was nothing remotely original about setting a wild west story in space; and George Lucas would never have allowed something as unsubtle as a Wanted poster in the movie. (For one thing, there is no paper in the Star Wars universe.) [*]  But this, the very first image of the very first post-Star Wars Star Wars story, six months before Splinter of the Minds Eye, a year and a half before the Infamous Christmas Special, correctly identified the unique selling point. 

Star Wars is kinda like a cowboy movie in space.

Well, it is. One of the small flaws of Empire Strikes Back and the big flaws of Revenge of the Sith is that it all takes place far too close to the center of government. Not a low-life scumbag to be seen. 

Nowadays we’d call this comic a jumping on point: if you hadn’t seen what was still a relatively new movie and hadn’t read the comic book you’d have no difficulty working out what was going on. Indeed Thomas has a fairly good stab at capturing the multi-generic atmosphere of Star Wars. It's not done perfectly, but if you honestly hadn't seen the film, this comic would give you some good hints of what all the shouting was about.

So: straight after the destruction of the Death Star, Han and Chewie leave Yavin and head back to Tatooine to pay off Jabba the Hutt. Before they even made it to hyperspace, they are attacked by pirates, and only escape with their lives by handing over their reward money. 

Some bits jar. The Pirates are flying one of the Big Pointy Ships from the opening scene of Star Wars, but no-one knows to call it an Imperial Star Destroyer. When Han meets an alien priest, he momentarily forgets he is in a Galaxy Far Far Away and says that he regrets skipping Sunday School. And poor Chewbacca is still envisaged as a berserker ("as soon as he smells first blood his wookie nature manifests itself in its usual manner"). But there are also lots of quotes and call backs to the canon, all 120 minutes of it. The pirate ship positions itself about the Millennium Falcon and swallows it up, just like it swallowed the Small Square Ship at the beginning of the movie. A mob of pirates board the Falcon like the Stormtroopers boarded the rebels; their leader ("a man in black") confronts Han, who instantly recognizes him as the pirate Crimson Jack. Han has hidden his treasure in the same smuggling compartments that he and his passengers hid in on the Death Star. If there had been Space Pirates in the movie, they wouldn’t have had actual cutlasses and literal eye patches, but “pirates in space” is very much the kind of thing you ought to bump into on the way to pay off a gangster the morning after you saved the universe.

They end up on Aduba-3, a planet in all respects indistinguishable form Tatooine — sand, domed buildings, banthas (identifiable only by their curly horns); a cantina (not a saloon or a pub -- definitely a cantina) with alien customers and a curved bar. People on Tatooine were prejudiced against droids - round here it's "borgs" that they don't serve. Han helps a local priest bury a half-man half-robot spacer in the local boot hill; and then local peasants ask him to protect them from a gang of hover bike riding thugs led by a Dick Dastardly look alike called, and I promise I am not making this up, Serji X Arrogantus. In the first issue, it seems as if the peasants are going to be honolable lacial stelleyotypes, but that idea mercifully goes away by the beginning of issue #8. Han takes the mission, and assembles (stop me if you've heard this before) a group of seven mismatched heroes to help him. It could just be that Roy Thomas is taking the "space western" brief a little too literally.

It's all very perfunctory and half-hearted. But the more closely I look, the convinced I am that the fantasy world I inhabited from the afternoon I saw A New Hope to the evening three years later when Empire Strikes Back burst all my bubbles, owes more to these comics than to the movie itself. Thomas deconstructs the movie. He breaks it down into it's component parts. He doesn't care about the background or the story ark, but he is tried to work out what made Star Wars so special, and feed some of that back into his Magnificent Seven parody. And after all this time, his half-memory of the flavour reminds us what that flavour was and why we got addicted to it.

Everyone remembers the giant carnivorous Rabbit, Jaxxon.  Unlike, say, Rocket Raccoon, he’s mainly memorable for being a giant carnivorous Rabbit. There is also a giant cat like porcupine which can shoot spines at baddies. Not very much comes of him, either. But you can see what Thomas was trying to do. Star Wars is a universe where aliens are all over the place and perfectly normal. Chebacca is a giant, growling, furry creature, but he's not an alien or a monster; he's just a character. (I don’t think those of us who have seen the film 50 times and more always remember just how weird this is.)  "How can we possibly top a space ship with a furry monster as first mate?" you can hear him saying "I know: how about teaming Han up with a big green talking rabbit?"

The curious thing is that Marvel, spotting that aliens were another selling point of Star Wars, decided to create two half-arsed creatures of their own. You might have expected them to have plucked a couple of beings from the canonical Catina -- Hammerhead Guy and one of the Guys With Big Bald Heads and flesh them out. 

More interesting is “Jimm”, a local teenager who calls himself, er, The Starkiller Kid. He wears Luke's hat with Luke's goggles, and  Luke's "judo" robes; he strikes Luke-like poses, wants to get off this crummy planet, and has freckles. In one way, it's embarrassingly poorly done: more like something out of Star Wars sketch on Crackerjack than an adaptation of a high profile movie by a major publishing company. But what it's aiming for is exactly what it should be aiming for. We want more Luke Skywalker. But we don't want Luke Skywalker as he ended up; well behaved, uniformed, decorated, in a military uniform. We want farm boy Luke, Luke the dreamy teenager, Luke sulking in his garage, Luke looking out to the binary sunset. The Starkiller Kid is Luke frozen at the moment we first met him. He's a kid playing at being Luke Skywalker. Just like me.

Luke-lite has Threepio-lite, why wouldn't he. A robot who speaks (I am quite sure) with an Anthony Daniels voice and says things like “I, sir, am FE-9Q, familiarly known as Effie” and “I’m just a tractor robot, and not really programmed for this sort of thing.” A robot called 3P0 who is known as Threepio is kind of funny. A robot called FE but known as Effie is merely cute: the kind of cute you want to thump. It wouldn't be long before Lucas was creating cute characters who everyone wanted to thump of his very own. 

Most interestingly of all we have, and once again I have to reassure readers that I am not making this up, Don Wan Kihotay, an older man with a beard who believes himself to be a Jedi. Again, you can see Thomas’ working pretty clearly. One of the crucial flavour notes of Star Wars is the presence (pretty far in the background) of the Jedi Knights; one of the coolest pieces of hardware is the lightsaber, even if it only appears in two or three scenes. If the Jedi existed, they'd be nothing more than dull warriors mind-powers (Lucas spent three whole movies demonstrating this point): they are only romantic because they lived a long time ago and are all dead. Since Ben-Obi-Want-Kenobi has gone to be more powerful than we can possibly imagine, the best Thomas can offer us is someone who thinks he is a Jedi. Someone who has heard about the Jedi, and wants to be one. Like, once again, me.

For this character to work properly, we have to have known a lot of stories of the Olden Days. If we wrote him now, we could have him referencing half-remembered events from the Clone Wars with the same pedantic enthusiasm as the real Don Quixote quoted Spanish chivalric romances, but Roy Thomas didn't have that kind of information at his disposal. So he fixed on the word "Knight" and envisaged quests and honour and archaic language and round tables and dubbing ceremonies. That's how I imagined Jedi; that's how I wanted Jedi to be; and that, indeed, is how Jedi were until we actually met Yoda and discovered they were an uneasy mix between the dullest kind of Sunday School teachers and the nastiest kind of P.E coach. [***] Again, the "knights" thing is arguably taken a bit too literally. In the final episode, the Magnificent Seven storyline takes a peculiar right turn specifically so that Don Kihotay can go up against a huge reptilian beast with his lightsaber, and the audience can all think “That’s kinda like a knight fighting a dragon.”

The comics are most notable for what they do not contain. No Darth Vader. Virtually no Luke Skywalker. No Empire. No Rebellion. No Force, really: when a mystical character is called for, he’s a non-specific priest worshiping a non-specific God. But I think Thomas got something right which Lucas got wrong. Star Wars isn’t a story; it’s an ethos. We don't want to know what happens next; we want to go back there. A comic doesn't become Star Wars by having Darth Vader in it: it becomes Star Wars by tasting like Star Wars. Thomas may not have got the flavour exactly right, but he knew what flavour he was aiming at.

That's what that cover is saying, isn't it? "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away...they all went off and had even more adventures, for ever and ever..."

[*] I think that the artists feel they need to show actual Stars to justify the “Star Wars” title. Five out of the first six post-movie issues have starry starry night skies on the cover. 

[**] On Tatooine, they wipe their bottoms with sand. On spaceships, there is an efficient decontamination ray built into the toilet itself. 

[***} Can’t…or won’t? Do…or do not. There is no try.

George and Joe and Jack and Bob

Complete Star Wars Essays 

£7

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How Atheism Works (part 94)

Noticing some fair-haired children in the slave market one morning, Pope Gregory, the memorable Pope, said (in Latin), 'What are those ?' and on being told that they were Angels, made the memorable joke — 'Non Angli, sed Angeli' ('not Angels, but Anglicans) and commanded one of his Saints called St Augustine to go and convert the rest.

                                  1066 And All That

NOTE 1: Not all atheists.

NOTE 2: Islam is not a race.

The following piece of silliness is circulating on the Twittersphere.

Astonishingly, some schools ask parents for information about their children when they start school. Astonishingly, some of these forms have a space marked “religion”. Non-religious parents presumably write "none" in the space and move on. But some parents apparently think that it's more helpful to write a long sarcastic letter and post it on the internet.

On the substantial point: I tend to agree that you should be careful of festooning children with their parent's beliefs. In the spring 1974 I remember my parents taking me on a march, with banners and a brass band and everything, to try to persuade the people of East Barnet to elect Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. (It didn’t work the first time, so we had a another go in the autumn.) In a way, that made me a Labour kid. On that basis, my friend, who marched behind the local MP, the Pythonesquely named Reginald Maudling, was probably a Conservative kid although neither of us could have answered detailed questions about the Common Market or Trade Union reform.

I still think that Thomas Helwys [*] had it right and Cranmer and Wesley had it wrong. Baptism ought to be a dramatic ceremony of rebirth, undertaken by someone who has positively decided that they want to be Christian, not a magic spell which turns a baby into an Anglican whether they like it or not. You can't blame the Book of Common Prayer if some people don’t take the ceremony seriously or understand what it means. But some fans of the Established Church encourage a theory that Christianity isn’t about belief or practice but about belonging — if you were baptised, or even just born in England, then you are Church of England whether you know it or not. A theory of belonging can to easily turn into a theory of exclusion. For every Rev Smallbone who thinks that it is his duty to serve everyone in his parish regardless of their faih there is a Daily Mail reading simian who thinks that "Christian" means "white person" and "Muslim" means "foreigner".

Islam teachers that everyone is a Muslim when they are born. But since “Muslim” means someone who is in submission to God, I think that only means that they don’t believe in Original Sin. A lot of American Christians speak as if they think “the Kingdom of God” and “America” are the same thing. Only sometimes does that turn into an actual theological theory.

The piece of sarcastic rubbish that some hardworkingteacher had to waste time replying to was not remotely interested in any point, substantive or otherwise. Someone saw the opportunity to participate in the Sacrament of the Sneer, and by Dawkins they went for it.

And so, accidentally, it gives us some interesting insights into how these people's minds work:

“…I asked how she views the transubstantiation of physical matter while the accidents of its appearance are preserved. She was totally unable to express an opinion so I began to think she may be a protestant…”

Got it. It is funny to ask if a ten year old is a Catholic because what identifies you as a Catholic is particular “views” on doctrinal questions expressed in technical language. I think you could very easily say to a ten-year-old “When we go to church, do you think that the bread and the wine becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus” and get a perfectly clear answer:

1: Yes: God changes it by a miracle

2: No: we do it to remember Jesus because he asked us to

3: Neither: only silly people in the olden days believed in Jesus

Of course, in each case, the answer would actually be "I believe whatever Daddy says." That applies to the so-called-atheist child just as much as the so-called-Catholic child. I know that I support Arsenal Football Club even though I have never watched a game of football in my life, and would need to double check if the football they play is the "kicking the ball through the goal" kind or the "carrying the ball over the line" kind.

“…To determine whether or not she may be protestant I decided to begin with the Ninety-Five theses of Martin Luther. Since Aideen was unable to name a single one, I thought that I might be on the wrong track altogether with Christianity…”

Got it. It is funny to ask if a ten year old is a Protestant because what makes you Protestant is the factual historical knowledge of the history of Lutheranism.

I am going to let you in on a little secret. I couldn’t name you one of Luther’s theses. I know that he disbelieved in the miracle of the Mass and didn’t think purgatory was real and was big on something called the Priesthood of All Believers. He believed in predestination, but not as much as Calvin. Again, I think you could perfectly well ask a ten year old “How do we find out what Jesus wants us to do?” and get a perfectly good answer:

1: By reading the Bible quietly by ourselves

2: By obeying what holy men like the Pope tell us

3: Don’t be silly, only silly people in the olden days believed in Jesus.

Again, the perfectly good answer would really be "I believe whatever Mummy believes". That's just the way things are.

"...I had to explain that neither a god with blue skin and an elephant head called Ganesh, nor a god with a monkey’s head called Hanuman, were in fact cartoon characters. Aideen seemed incredulous that a billion people could believe in such deities…”

And now we come to the point. White People’s religion is about dry, obscure knowledge that you couldn’t possibly expect a child to have an opinion on. Brown People’s religion is silly and childish and a ten year old can instantly see through it without a moment’s thought. This is consistent with the dogma promulgated in the atheist's holy book which says that it is worth spending a few pages taking down monotheism, but that you should simply "gesture towards" polytheism, say "who cares?" and then move on.

“...She also seemed less than enthused about the idea that the divine might provide instructions to a husband on how he should beat his wife, thereby ruling out Islam too…”

Again: one set of Brown People have a religion which is childish and silly; and the other set have one which is violent and primitive, and there is no more to be said. You can’t positively declare that you believe in the White Man's God unless you can understand complex dogmatic points in technical language. But you only need to hear one line from the Turk Bible to know that Brown Man's God is rubbish. Someone who abstains from food during Ramadan, observes the prayer times, attends mosque on Friday, chooses traditional modes of dress but admits that he has a problem with some of the more bloodthirsty passages in the Koran is not a Muslim. A ten year old says so.

It seems to be false to say that the Koran contains instructions on how a man should beat his wife; although it does seem to be true that it says that he is permitted to strike her under certain circumstances.

One meets incredibly annoying pedants who arbitrarily assign “true” meanings to words and act with mock outrage and fake incomprehension when you use the word in a different, (i.e normal) way.

“You said that your friend Steven was gay, but he didn’t seem especially joyful to me” they say

“You said that at the end of the day we would have to accept a small pay cut, but I can’t see why we couldn’t do it first thing in the morning and get it over with.”

"There was a small mistake in your article" they say innocently "You referred to Mr Hitler as an extreme right-wing dictator, where in fact everyone knows that the Nazis were leftists."

The new Atheist has decided to define “religion” as “a set of doctrinal opinions” or “the literal belief in particular set of scriptures”: and feign surprise that anyone — a school teacher, for example — could possibly use the word in a different sense.

Protestantism isn’t the 95 Theses. It really isn’t. It’s about what kind of service you attend; what kind of hymns you are familiar with; what festivals you observe; what kind of clothes you’ve been brought up to consider modest; what community you see yourself as part of; and  — very, very probably — what part of town you live in. It is kind and neighborly to find out if someone is a Catholic or a Protestant so you know what day of the year they get presents on and whether the fourth Thursday before first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox is a special day or not. It is kind and neighborly to find out if someone is a Hindu or a Muslim so you’ll understand why they are giving strangers sweeties or skipping lunch and whether there is any kind of meat they'll be freaked out by. (No, at ten years old they probably can’t give you a degree level essay on why Hindus abstain from beef and Muslims abstain from pork. But think how you'd feel on your first day at a new school if someone gave you a plateful of roast dog.)

“But I don’t indoctrinate my child into any faith. We do not celebrate Yon Kippur or Diwali or Eid. We only celebrate the universal human non-religious festivals like Christmas and Easter. We don’t have any rules about what food we eat, apart from civilized white people’s rules about cat and dog and horse. And we aren’t part of any community, although like all normal people we mainly mix with middle-class college educated atheists. None of our best friends are Muslims."

Great. That was exactly what the form was asking you. Does your family have any special festivals, any special holidays, any days where you eat special food, which we ought to know about? If the answer is “no” then “no religion” is the answer and it tells the school exactly what it needed to know.

You don’t do any special festivals, and your kid doesn’t do any special festivals. You don’t have any special dietary rules, and your kid doesn’t have any special dietary rules. You don’t have any particular beliefs about God, and your child doesn’t have any particular beliefs about God. But that’s not because you’ve been raising them according to your beliefs. Oh, goodness gracious me no, no, no, no, no.

[*] I looked it up

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If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, please consider reading my book "Where Dawkins Went Wrong"

20

Shattered Empire gives us very few clues: not that we necessarily expected or wanted it to.

Star Wars — the new totally canon Marvel comic — felt (at least to start with) like a movie. I have described reading it as being like looking outside the frame; seeing what was going on just before or just after or just out of shot in a famous scene. 

Shattered Empire feels more like an annotation; like someone scribbling in the margins of a holy text. [*] Quite pretty scribbling, actually. But it keeps telling me things I wish I didn’t know. 

As Luke Skywalker flies the shuttle -- the shuttle bearing his father’s body -- from the Death Star to Endor, he is intercepted by an A-Wing pilot. 

The following conversation ensues: 

“…Vessel is under friendly control” 

“Commander? Not your usual ride. Always heard you were an X-Wing jockey” 

“I was kinda in a hurry” 

I was kinda in a hurry? This is the Luke Skywalker who has just acted out the world-saving drama that is at the heart of the whole ennealogy. The Luke Skeywalker who has taken off the black mask and seen his father’s face for the first time. The Luke Skywalker who has, incidentally, been zapped practically to death by the Emperor. His last words in the Trilogy are “I’m going to save you”. They should be left to stand; until after the funeral pyre, until after the Force ghosts. 

“I’m going to save you..” 

“You already have” 

“I was kinda in hurry…” 

If we must slip in behind the frame, then the question we would like an answer to is "What came of Anakin-Vader’s last command?" Did Luke tell his sister he was right him? And if so, how did she react? Can she forgive the person who blew up her planet as easily as Luke could forgive the person who killed Owen and Beru and Ben and Biggs? And how does this knowledge affect her? Leia appears in the comic, but there is no sense that anything traumatic has happened. Han seems to have forgotten all about the “he’s my brother” revelation within literally minutes. That’s a scene we’d like to have seen as well. 

Of course, we know what’s going on. Jason Aaron is in some respect strait jacketed in the Star Wars comic because he is writing about character’s in the past tense. He can’t decide that Chewie was killed in between episode IV and V; any major new character introduced has pretty much got to be vaporized before they get to Hoth. But he’s also got a certain amount of leeway: he knows where his cast have got to end up, but he is pretty free to choose the route. And he knows lots of stuff that they don't. Greg Rucka has all the limitations but none of the freedom. He can’t do anything that might contradict the Force Awakens; but he doesn’t know, any more than we do, what the Force Awakens is actually going to be about. 

If anything, the absences are the big clues. The lack of a Big Scene between Luke and Leia and another Big Scene between Luke and Han suggests that those Big Scene are going to feature in the forthcoming movie. [**]

There is a plot. The plot is that The Empire wasn’t completely defeated after Return of the Jedi. Before the last firework burns out and the last gub-gub fades away, the Rebels are defending themselves against Imperial Remnants who are bent on carrying out the Emperor’s last command — which involves flattening particular planets like Sterdic IV, the Wretch of Tayron and Naboo. Repeating the Rebel Propaganda that the Emperor is dead is treason, obviously. 

I suppose that if there is going to be a story, there have to be baddies, and I am pleased that the new film will involve the real space ships from the real movies not the made up hardware from the prequels. But does this have to be done in such a way as to wipe out Return of the Jedi? The film ends on a Great Victory. There are fireworks. George retrospectively decided that there were fireworks on Naboo and Coruscrant and Tatooine. But here is Han on the morning after telling us that "it’s not over yet” and wondering why no-one told the Empire that it lost. One of the “crawls” actually goes so far as to say that "for many rebels, the dream of laying down their arms and living in peace seems further away than the elation of victory promise". 

If the Empire is a military machine then killing off the Leader might in itself make very little difference. The loss of a huge piece of military hardware that they’ve sunk vast resources into would probably be more serious. To lose one Death Star might be regarded as misfortune; to lose two seems like carelessness. But if the Empire is the metaphorical representation of all that is Evil then killing the Dark Lord ought to be pretty final. Tolkien knew what he was doing when he said that the Dark Tower literally fell as soon as the Ring went into the furnace. 

In Lucas’s original conception, the Emperor was basically weak and corrupt: out of touch with his people, manipulated by his generals, somewhere between President Nixon and the emperor of Japan. But in the canonical version, the transition from republic to Empire and the Clone Wars are part of a Sith Masterplan. With the Sith Master dead and the Sith Apprentice both dead and returned to the Light Side, surely the Empire ought to revert to a more or less benevolent Republic more or less immediately? Indeed, if the Emperor knew he was about to lose, wouldn’t preserving the Sith bloodline be his primary concern? 

Leia goes to Naboo to warn them about that the Empire is coming. Palpatine demilitarized the planet, but Queen Soruna knows that there are ships and weapons from the Olden Days hidden deep in the the bowels of the planet. (Naboo fashion hasn't become any less ridiculous in the 30 years since we were last there, incidentally.) Down in the hangar, Leia announces that it is cold; and we see Darth Maul’s face superimposed over hers. Is this a clue that Maul is alive and well and appearing in Episode VII? He was killed in Phantom Menace, of course, but recovered from his death during the Clone Wars TV series and not definitively killed off. He'd have to be well into his 80s, but we don’t know what the expect lifespan of a red and black faced Sith would be. (It was cannon that Wookies live 200 years before The Force Awakens was a twinkle in Walt Disney’s eye.) I think it’s more likely that Leia just experiences a Force shiver because she’s in the place where Darth Vader’s predecessor met one of his deaths. 

I sometimes wondered if writer Rucka and artist Checchetto have grasped the iconic significance of the material they're dealing with. Leia and the gang fly the pointy yellow Naboo ships from Phantom Menace against a post-Imperial Star Destroyer and it launches its entire cohort of TIE fighters at them. Lando and the little mousy guy from Return of the Jedi arrive ("why show up early when you can arrive in the nick of time") with some X and Y-Wings to save the day. It ought to feel at least a little bit special to see Prequel Ships and Trilogy ships fighting against and alongside each other. At any rate the artwork ought to rise to the occasion. But it doesn't. Something in the way it's drawn makes me feel that no-one quite spotted what an important moment this should have been. Where is full page spread of a Naboo Figheter and an X-Wing alongside each other? 

Luke Skywalker suddenly becomes very worried about retrieving something which the Empire stole from the Jedi Temple on Coruscrant. He hasn't had a chance to change his clothes since the movie, so his black robe and black jumpsuit still scream "potential dark lord" at us. He's not become Yoda yet, but he is inclined to be cryptic in a way that I imagine makes people want to punch him. ("I send Artoo to find a pilot, and here you are. Interesting.") It turns out that what he is after is a tree — a tree which grew in the Jedi Temple. The Force is with it, apparently. And it is sufficiently important that the Empire have kept it heavily guarded. This is such an off the wall idea that the one thing I think we can be totally sure about is that the Jedi Tree will be an important part of The Force Awakens. 

Everything is told from the point of view of one Shara Bey and Kes Dameron, a pilot and a seargent in the Rebellion. Shara acts as Leia’s wingperson during the trip to Naboo and helps Luke retrieve the Jedi tree. The story ends with them “mustering out” of the rebellion and retiring to a foresty planet with ziggurats in the background. Although we never see him, they have a child named Poe. Luke gives them the tree to take care of. 

Of course, there may be dozens of hidden foreshadowings running through the comic which will only become apparent in December. But it looks very much as if we have a four part series to set up the fact that X-Wing Pilot Poe Dameron grew up on the planet Yavin with his aging parents, who were veterans of the Battle of Endor and custodians of the White Tree of Numenor. 

Which is nice. 

I have tried to watch Star Wars I - VI in one go, as a single movie, and give them the benefit of the doubt. It just doesn’t work. Even if you go with the retrofitted Episodes IV - VI there is a horrible gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Of course there is. Nothing introduced in I - III — gungans and Qui-Gon and Jedi Temples and midichlorians and what-not — can possibly be referenced in IV - VI because (obviously) the films were made in the wrong order. (The Naboo vignette at the end of the Return of the Jedi special edition simply made the wound more gaping.) 

For me, that’s one of the nicest things about these comics: they gently fold the hated Prequels back into the sacred Trilogy. Seeing Leia go to Naboo and hearing Luke speak of the Jedi Temple is almost like the thawing out a family feud. But people who regard Jar Jar Binks as a personal affront, and will reject these books on the grounds of Queen Soruna alone. And I am guessing that "should Abrams admit that the prequels ever happened" will be the biggest dividing line over the Force Awakens.

[*]You can tell how pious a Christian is by how many Bibles he has worn out with cross- references and marker pens. A Muslim would find the merest pencil underlying of a helpful passage blasphemous.  

[**] Walt Simonson said the only clues he had about the original trilogy he had when working on the old Marvel comics were when a plot was specifically vetoed. He had an idea to do a comic in which the Empire created a second Death Star ("and this time put some chicken wire over the exhaust port"), but George Lucas said he couldn't. "Aha..." he said.

George and Joe and Jack and Bob

Complete Star Wars Essays 

£7






 If everyone reading this essay pledged $2, I could do this full time. 

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I very recently joined the Labour Party because I believed that you would be driven by your conscience and convictions, rather than merely seek sympathetic headlines in far-right newspapers.

I think that war is always a very great evil. I think that civilized countries should only resort to war when there is literally no alternative. There are obviously alternatives to bombing Syria.

No-one has made it clear what such a war would be likely to achieve. And if the country is as bankrupt as we keep being told, we can't afford it anyway.

Ten years ago, those of us who opposed the war in Iraq were called cowards and traitors by the same right-wingers who want to have another war next week. Today absolutely everyone (even Mr Blair, I think) agrees that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake. Ten years from now any bombing of Syria will be regarded as a similarly catastrophic error. Whatever happens next week, you can be sure that people will be saying "Jeremy was right" for years to come.

I don't want to live in a one party state, where only one voice (the voice of the Daily Mail) is permitted, and where anyone who speaks out against a war or an economic policy is branded a traitor or a communist by both parties. The job of the opposition is to oppose -- that is, to constructively critique the government. So it is important that the Labour Party oppose this crazy war even -- especially -- if the crazy war goes ahead. If both sides of the House of Commons support the crazy war, then the millions of us who oppose it are simply denied a voice, a say, a stake in the decision.

I think that Cameron's war, like Blair's war, will turn out to be a reckless waste of money and lives that will only make matters much worse. I think that you and the other moderates who think that war is only ever a last resort should stick to your consciences. Do not let the extremists in your own party and the far-right press who think that bombs are the solution to everything derail you.

Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me; stay in touch.

Andrew

Read: "Je Suis Andrew"

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