This episode starts with one of the coolest Aliens references I’ve seen. Just like the opening salvage team in James Cameron’s alien, the Death Watch, led by Pre Vizsla, cut open a hole in the ship Obi-Wan and Asajj Ventress left them in and find them in a form of hyper-sleep. It’s long been known that the Force can allow Force-users to enter a hibernation sleep to preserve their life signs. Based on the glittery dust (perfectly recreated from the opening of Aliens), they must have been drifting in space for quite a while.

Both Death Watch and the Sith brothers see this as a fortuitous opportunity to consolidate forces to take back the Galaxy, with Mandalore as a first step. I loved the scene between Vizsla and Maul drinking tea. I love moments like that, when villains show a more quiet side, discussing things. Though Vizsla did give a rousing speech about Mandalore:

But since neither Pre Vizsla nor Darth Maul have honor, they’re both plotting to betray each other, exactly as you’d think the situation would turn out. But who is going to get the upper-hand here?

This episode is action and set-up heavy, but for a setup episode it really knocked my socks off. Sure, it had long scenes of Vizsla and Maul talking, but it also had decapitations, face-offs between Sith and the Bounty Hunters (including Embo and his James Bond-Odd Job hat), showdowns with Black Sun and Jabba’s army, Mandos flying through the sky and blowing things up… It had everything you could have wanted as far as action goes for an episode, save a lightsaber on lightsaber showdown between a Jedi and a Sith.

More than anything, though, this episode is Maul assembling his chess pieces for the epic match of grandmasters to come. On one side you have Palpatine, Yoda, and the Jedi Council, on the other side you have Sidious, Dooku, and the Separatists, and then a new force in Maul, Death Watch, and the entire underworld.

It’s sad when you think about who it is who has the advantage here and pieces on two sides of the board.

Death Watch will be but a blip to be swept up under the conflict, and Maul will be pinched out from the Republic and the Separatists. And based on that trailer for the rest of Season 5, Sidious is going to be the one personally mopping the floor with Maul.

Things are finally kicking in to high gear with the Clone Wars. This was a solid episode with high-octane action and excellently scripted exposition. Hopefully we’ll see the pieces move deeper into play next week and into the weeks beyond.

At the USO premiere screening event of Star Wars: The Clone Wars in San Diego, I saw ‘Eminence’ and don’t want to spoil it. You better watch it! (more…)

Everyone likes to personalize their stuff. One of the best ways is through desktop wallpaper. Rather than having a boring hatchmark, or worse yet, a solid color, wallpapers really let you express your individuality. Still, they’re a dime a dozen, right? Anyone can whip up a few pieces of clip art and have something, yes? Well, yeah I guess, but sometimes one comes across wallpaper so spectacular, that they have to well, write an article about it. That’s what happened, when I came across Todd Brewer’s deviantART gallery.

You see, Todd takes classic comic book covers, disassembles their elements, and then rearranges them into incredibly eye-catching pieces of monitor art. While covering such diverse characters as Captain America, Batman, Shazam Captain Marvel, Green Lantern, and Aquaman, nothing comes close to Todd’s comprehensive collection of Action Comics and Superman wallpaper. Of course, I could talk about it all day, but instead, let’s just take a look at some of my favorites.

Pretty good, eh? Well, if you like that, Mr. Brewer informs me that there are many, many more to come…

I plan to continue my classic series soon. That includes Action, GL, Captain Marvel (both Fawcett & DC), The Flash, Wonder Woman etc. I have hundreds if not thousands of images in my “To Do” folders. I just don’t seem to have enough time “to do” them. lol. Of course it doesn’t help that I am always on google or DA looking for something new that I don’t have already.

Well, he has a fan in me, and I am really looking forward to classic Captain Marvel covers, there are some real gems in there. If you’d like to see Todd’s full gallery of work, check out his DA page, and drop him a line, and tell him how much you like his work and his passion! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stare at my new King Superman desktop, Pope hat and all.

Warren Murphy’s series of Destroyer novels were one of my favorite pleasures as a kid who read everything. Reading them in retrospect, I have no honest explanation as of to why my parents allowed me to read them at the age of 8. They were awesome, don’t get me wrong. They still are, in fact. But they were full of so much sex, swearing, action, killing, and subversive and hilarious satire that it’s a wonder I didn’t end up trying to be a government paid assassin of some sort.

Revisiting the books over the years I constantly slap my forehead, wondering how I was given such negligent parents who allowed me to read it, but I was constantly grateful, too.

I’d play “Remo Williams” on the playground as much as Star Wars. They even took me to the drive in to see the wonderfully horrible “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” starring Fred Ward as the new apprentice of Sinanju.

Well, I’m a more sheltering parent than mine were and have been looking for a way to share the exploits of the House of Sinanju with my son.

Well, in all of his infinite wisdom, Warren Murphy and his co-writer on this project, Gerald Welch, have given us stories in that world that are friendly to younger readers and will, hopefully, serve as a gateway drug to the real deal when I deem my kids old enough to check it out. Legacy is a series in the world of the Destroyer that follows the children of Remo Williams and their Sinanju training and their work thwarting evil plots.

The first book, Forgotten Son, faces them off against an army of invading Mexican Ninjas. The book maintains the same breathless humour and action that grace the adult series, but in a way that both me and a younger demographic will enjoy. Sure, it errs more on the side of conservatism when it picks its political satire these days, but if you can get through that, you’re rewarded anyway.

I would highly recommend picking this up for yourself and anyone else half interested in the series. And while you’re at it, go ahead and start picking up the original series for a re-read. The books are all quick, light reads that will make you happy. And, as I write this, the first book is free on Kindle for some reason.

Legacy: Forgotton Son is $4.99 for Kindle and $9.99 in print. Pick it up now.

I wrote an accompanying review of Batman #16 with excerpts of this interview for The Huffington Post. This is the full interview with Scott Snyder about Batman and where this arc has been and where it’s heading.

I’ll tell you all that if you haven’t yet read the 16th issue of Batman, there are spoilers in this interview.

Bryan Young:  I just finished reading 16.  It’s something I don’t think people would have expected with the New 52, being so steeped with winks and nods into classic Batman history.  How did you balance the needs of the New 52 while permeating it with the history between the two of them?

Wow.

This is really what we’ve all been waiting for. Ever since I saw the trailer for the whole season, this is what things have been leading toward. This is going to be amazing.

From the press release:

After barely escaping their encounter with the Jedi at the beginning of the season, Savage and Maul are found by Death Watch. Both parties forge an alliance when they realize they have a common enemy in the Jedi general, Obi-Wan Kenobi, in “Eminence,” airing this Saturday, January 19th at 9:30am ET/PT on Cartoon Network.

Trivia:

• · Guest Stars: Pre Vizsla is voiced by Producer/Director Jon Favreau, Darth Maul is voiced by actor Sam Witwer (Being Human), Savage Opress is voiced by actor Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption) and Bo-Katan is voiced by actress Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica).
• · The discovery of the incapacitated Sith brothers, nearly frozen in a drifting starship, was staged as an homage to the opening scenes of Aliens (1986) wherein Ripley is found by a salvage team.
• · All the Huttese dialogue in the episode was translated from English. The phrase “Stuka Crispo,” heard uttered by Jabba the Hutt, means “Death Watch.”

The Amazing Randi is an amazing person. You should all know who he is. Watch the above video.

Now, Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein need our help to finish the film.

I know Tyler and have even done an incredibly small amount of work for him on this film and I 100% believe that it’s going to end up being an amazing film. If you don’t believe me, just watch that pitch one more time.

I’ve worked on the film AND I’ve pledged to the Kickstarter. I hope you will, too.

For more information about the film, be sure to check out their website, An Honest Liar.

And spread the word!

For the second episode of the Full of Sith podcast, Mike, Consetta, and I interviewed Steve Sansweet, the man behind Rancho Obi-Wan, owner of the largest private Star Wars collection in the world, and the longtime head of fan relations for Lucasfilm.

We talked about his new book, his long and storied career as a collector, and his relationship to Star Wars.

It was a fantastic interview and I hope you all check it out.

To listen to the interview, check it out on iTunes or head over to Full of Sith for a direct link.

Full Of Sith is a safe haven for Star Wars fans, no matter what you like or what your opinions are, we’d love for you to share them with us. Please do so by sending us a voicemail (206-426-5592) or email.

Welcome to the third installment of The Gamemaster. This is where I’ve been documenting my sojourn back into gaming as a first time GM in the game of Pathfinder. To catch up on the series, go ahead and check this out, but they are by no means necessary to enjoy this column, but you may well find them informative. The first installment was about getting back in the swing of things and the second was about character back stories.

Today, I want to talk about the two different “first sessions” I ran and offer some perspective on how I’d do it again if I could.

In the very first session I played, I struggled to find a starting point that made sense. But I’d gone over all of the backstories with the players, collaborating on that process so I knew exactly why each character was connected. And I knew they were on a refugee trail from one city in the kingdom that had fallen to the enemy to a free city still loyal to the missing King. But walking along a road toward another city isn’t all that exciting. My hope was that the players would roleplay with each other, getting to know their characters. This is the point at which they’d been thrown in together. Two characters were already part of a group that wanted to become the resistance and the others had globbed onto the group because they’d helped get them out of the city.

When it became apparent they weren’t exactly interested in roleplaying and the opening scene stagnated, I improvised.

Scouts of the enemy, running the opposite direction with a message, arrived.

A battle ensued and it set the pace for the rest of the session for the players. Everything went smoothly from there, but I knew that their characters interacting with each other was less important to them than interacting with me, with non-player characters, and the battle in front of them.

It was certainly not what I expected, but as I said before, this group was a lot more interested in combat as a strategy game than roleplaying. But having warmed them up with the combat, they warmed up to the roleplaying later in the session and it got to be great fun.

Word spread among a couple of the players after that and an entirely different group heard about my game and wanted me to GM another campaign with them. I agreed and I set out to carve out a completely different piece of the world I created for these new characters to inhabit. They figured out what sort of characters they wanted to play, we collaborated on the backgrounds of the characters and we were ready to play.

That’s when I asked if I could do something a little different. In the last first session I played, a battle was required to bring the players and their characters together and I wanted to skip that awkward bit at the beginning of the first session of this game.

I asked the players if they minded if I started them mid-encounter.

If you were to write a great opening hook to a book, you’d never start with the characters sitting around, waiting for adventure to call, you’d start it mid-adventure. Look at Star Wars. Sure it was the beginning of the adventure for Luke, but the opening shots were a chase between Vader and Leia with little context. She had the plans he was looking for, he captured her.

If they would indulge me, I’d set the scene for them and begin the session in mid-chase. Since the story we’d come up with for all the characters is that they were all reluctantly working together and barely knew each other, it would give them a chance to do that “getting to know you” roleplaying right in the thick of it from the get go.

Now, this second group is much more dedicated to the roleplaying aspects every bit as much as they are the combat, but combining it into a slightly challenging chase encounter from the first moments allowed them to really feel it. I had the map ready, the encounter set up, their characters ready to go. We didn’t spin our wheels at all. I explained they were carrying the body of a beaten and tortured member of the resistance that they’d rescued from the enemy and we’re escaping in the sewers back to their safe-haven. There were a number of guards chasing them, less than a hundred feet away, and unknown dangers ahead.

The difference in experience from the first game to the second was quantifiable. It made me realize how important two things were. First, players need a hook every bit as much as you do. Secondly, it emphasized how important preparation was. If you’re there, ready to go from the start, and you aren’t just spinning your wheels trying to guide them into the first part of the game, it sets the pace for the rest of the evening.

That’s something I’m still working on, though. Coming from a screenwriting and novelist background, pacing is very important to me, and starting with a bang is important, and I didn’t want to do it with them waking up unconscious in a new environment wondering how they got there. It’s a bit cliched, and they’d find ways to make that happen for themselves later.

So, think about that for your next session. Hopefully it helps you think of things in a different way that will make your game better.

Update: The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Zack Snyder’s people and found that he is not working on a Star Wars film of any sort.

Vulture is reporting that Zack Snyder is making a Star Wars movie, just not Episode VII, VIII, or IX.

According to Vulture, he’ll be remaking Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai with Jedi, set sometime after Return of the Jedi.

It will be an as-yet-untitled Jedi epic loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai, with the ronin and katana being replaced by the Force-wielding knights and their iconic lightsabers.

The plausible elements of this news?

First, Disney said they’d be making Star Wars movies outside the numbered saga. They also said they’d be all over the place. It’s also rumoured that it is these outside the numbered saga films that Lawrence Kasdan is working on, not direct followups to Return of the Jedi. It’s also well-known that Kurosawa is a huge influence on Star Wars. I wrote about it at length in my column over at StarWars.Com, The Cinema Behind Star Wars. Zack Snyder is also a popular name to bandy about whenever a geek project is mentioned.

And it wouldn’t be the first time Seven Samurai had been adapted into the Star Wars universe. Or even the second time. It was the first Expanded Universe story in the Marvel Comics adaptations, featuring Han, Chewie, a crazy old Jedi Knight patterned after Don Quixote, and Jaxxon the Rabbit, among others. They also did it on The Clone Wars in the episode “Bounty Hunters.” It’s great material and Star Wars can do it in endless ways. Casting the Samurai as Jedi in the post-Return of the Jedi era sounds fascinating.

All of those parts of the story sound plausible. Awesome even.

But the part of this I find implausible is Vulture. Again, there is no source for any of this. None. Who did they talk to? Where did this come from? Is there an interview? They’re billing this as an exclusive but there is nothing in the article to indicate where they got this idea. They didn’t even point to “sources at Lucasfilm.”

It was just a very matter-of-fact “this is happening.”

We’ll see. It’s totally possible. They may have gotten it right. But bear in mind they could have just as easily made the whole thing up.

[source: Club Jade]

(And be sure to listen to the Full of Sith podcast)