I’ve heard rumblings about this for a while now, but it’s now official and public.
When The Clone Wars was cancelled, one of the single biggest dangling threads was Darth Maul’s place on the show. They brought him back (with gusto!) and rebuilt him up into one of the coolest bad guys of entire Clone Wars era. And when it seemed as though Sidious would be killing him off, Sidious instead saved him, citing other uses for the character.
It was a cruel cliffhanger, to be sure, but the scripts for the conclusion to Darth Maul’s story were written. They had no original intentions of leaving us hanging. But the show was cancelled, and instead of leaving us hanging completely, Dark Horse Comics will be turning the teleplays into a four issue comic book series.
Writer Jeremy Barlow gave the pertinent details to Newsarama in an interview today:
Due to the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show’s sudden cancelation, Lucasfilm wasn’t able to film the final episodes of the series, which is a shame because the story is an important — and action-packed — chapter in Darth Maul’s continuing evolution as envisioned by George Lucas.
Never ones to let a good story slip away, Dark Horse and the team at Lucasfilm saw an opportunity to save these teleplays from obsolescence and we’re adapting them into a four-part miniseries called Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir.
I’m very glad to see this dangling thread resolved, and using the story created by George Lucas for it. The Clone Wars team did nothing but great things with the character and, to be honest, it makes me sad that we won’t be seeing it on the small screen and we won’t be hearing what Sam Witwer does with the character.
The book hits comic book stores in May. Be sure to snatch them up immediately, because there’s no guarantee they’ll still be around come 2015.