Part of Disney and Lucasfilm's plan for their new Star Wars franchise was to get rid of the clutter. That meant wiping the messy continuity clean and leaving only the original and prequel trilogies, The Clone Wars, and Star Wars Rebels as official canon. But there is money to be made and merchandise to be sold, and that means the time has come to start filling in the gaps again with Disney setting off on one massive campaign to do just that.
Disney has announced that 20 Star Wars books will be released this year to fill in the 32-year timeline gap between Return of the Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. They'll be aiming for every target audience with sticker books to YA books and novels, each with special Easter Eggs revealing clues about the upcoming movie.
How exactly is this not going to muck up the timeline again?
“The Force Awakens is an extraordinarily, heavily guarded storyline. To track it, a lot of top-secret meetings were happening up in San Francisco as we worked through this program,” says Andrew Sugerman, executive vice president of Disney Publishing Worldwide. “The partnership with the story group and the editorial team always had to be true to the sanctity of the film while making sure that we find these moments to introduce hints, clues, and puzzle pieces. Without revealing what those pieces are, it will just allow readers to speculate about the new film: What could a location mean, or what could a character mean?”
Marvel Comics, Del Rey, and DK will be publishing the stories, with some of the titles already announced. There's the novel Star Wars: Aftermath, which sounds like it may be a key component in the new franchise. Marvel Comics will release the prequel Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens, along with a prequel told from the perspective of C3PO. Moving Target is a Princess Leia tale penned by Cecil Castellucci; Luke Skywalker gets his own story with Jason Fry's The Weapon of a Jedi; and the Han Solo adventure Smuggler's Run will be written by acclaimed author and comics writer Greg Rucka.
Guh! Time to start clearing some shelf space. [EW]
