Our latest guest was an editor at Dark Horse comics until 2008 and as a writer has been a part of the companies final Star Wars series, it’s last after a run of over two decades. Please welcome to Jedi News Jeremy Barlow.
JN: Jeremy, welcome to Jedi News. How did it feel to be writing a comic that would be one of the first entries into the new official Star Wars canon?
JB: No pressure there, right? Actually, the Lucasfilm Story Group’s new canon/continuity approach hadn’t yet been announced when I started writing the series, so I didn’t know Son of Dathomir was going to be one of the first new entries. It’s good thing, too, because I was already putting tremendous pressure on myself to stick the landing!
JN: What was your first experience with Star Wars?
JB: Oh, man—that goes way back. I have a very vague memory of seeing A New Hope at the drive-in in the back of my parent’s Chevy Blazer. It had to have been a revival or re-release of some kind, though, ‘cause I can’t have been old enough to remember seeing it ’77.
After that, it was all action figures, all the time! I once collected and sent enough “proof of purchase” points to get a Bossk figure in the mail. That was a highlight. I also went as Boba Fett for Halloween when I was around 6-7 years old. I loved it!
JN: What’s your impression of Darth Maul. Did you like getting in his head?
JB: I’ve made no secret of the fact that I thought bringing Maul back was a bad idea. There wasn’t enough depth to his character in The Phantom Menace, I thought, to really warrant telling more stories about him—but I was wrong.
The tale that Dave Filoni and the rest of Star Wars: The Clone Wars crew crafted for Maul is really soulful and tragic, which are exactly the kinds of character stories I like to write. Once I saw that I jumped in with both feet.
I see Maul as being very driven and ambitious, but also having some major parental issues that he can’t let go. As a child, he’s stolen away from Talzen—who apparently didn’t expend too much energy trying to get him back until much later—and later in life, once he’s settled in as Sidious’ right hand man and doing what he’s been trained all of his life to do, he’s tossed aside and replaced without a second thought.
It was already there in the screenplays, but I really tried to play up that angle—what Maul wants most of all is to impress Sidious (his ‘father’) and prove that he’s the Sith Lord’s equal. That’s a soft spot that both Sidious and Talzin exploit for their ends.
JN: Was the Sith infiltrator in the 4th issue, Maul’s original one or another model?
JB: In the episode screenplay, that ship is designated as “similar to what Darth Maul flew in Episode I”—so it’s another model.
JN: What’s the deal with Talzin’s rebirth? Wasn’t she already “whole” in the Disappeared Arc of Season 6?
JB: I think the idea there is that she only has enough power to maintain a solid form for short periods of time, and that’s why she and Maul plan to consume Dooku’s energy. Absorbing a Sith Lord’s power would be enough to sustain her permanently, but we’ve now all seen how well that turned out. Of course, this is all assumption on my part. I wasn’t privy to Dave Filoni’s master plan for Talzin.
JN: Mace thinks Dooku was Maul’s original master. Didn’t Maul die right before Dooku left?
JB: I’m sure there’s an explanation for that…I just don’t have one! As far as Mace Windu knows, Dooku could’ve been dabbling in the Dark Side long before he broke ties with the Jedi Order (just roll with me here—we don’t know yet how the new canon falls together!), and that he’d been grooming and training Maul for years. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
JN: How did you get the chance to write the Son of Dathomir?
JB: My Dark Horse editor (and old pal) Randy Stradley called me up. We’ve worked together for years and can lock in pretty quickly on what we want to do. Successfully adapting screenplays in to comics is difficult, and there was a very short deadline to get Son of Dathomir rolling, so I’m flattered that Randy thought I was up to the job.
But really, I can only take a very small part of the credit for how well everything turned out. Screenwriter Aida Mashaka Cole crafted a really exciting story to begin with, and I was only building on the foundation that she supplied. So that, along with the rest of the amazingly talented creative team—Juan Frigeri, Mario Vargas, Wes Dzoba, and Michael Heisler—really made the book sing. I was honored to be a part of it, and to be the one carrying Dark Horse’s Star Wars torch to the very end.
Jeremy Barlow Interview Copyright 2014 Jedi News. No part of this interview can be reproduced without prior written consent from Jedi News.