In continuity, the biggest Luke book between ROTJ and TLJ is still The Legends of Luke Skywalker by Ken Liu; only one of the stories inside seems to be one that actually happened, but the test deals with his legend and somewhat hilarious misconceptions about it. It’s like the Legends of the Dark Knight episode from the Batman Animated Series. There also is that one mission in Battlefront II’s story mode, where Luke encounters one of Inferno Squad’s members and you get the the backstory of a prop briefly seen in the background of TLJ.
...If you don’t mind a recommendation from the old Legends EU that you may have heard fans debate about against of for TLJ’s comparative value with, I’d seriously recommend Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. It’s probably the gold standard that Legends fans who dislike TLJ would hold up as what they could have had instead.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Mindor's pretty good. It's kind of interesting how-especially around that time-the books started to sort of mine some of the earlier EU. "Shadowspawn" in particular dates back to the 1979 newspaper comics. I think they're also one of the first appearances of Stormtroopers in black armor as well (although the TIE pilots do have a similar look).
chrism227.wordpress.com Info and opinions on a variety of interests.
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Shadows of Mindor has a crazy genesis - it was basically the result of about two decades of reference book filler and colorful-but-unseen background fluff slowly getting merged and welded together, from excuses given out to explain Luke not having a military rank like Han and Lando maintained in the Bantam Era EU to either a misspelling as “Mindar” or just a coincidence in planet name creation in other books, slowly built up almost as an in-joke... then handed to Matthew Mother-Kriffin’ Stover.
I’ll be honest, I’d love to do some kind of debate about TLJ vs SoM as a kind of debate about which story just functions and executes better, and whether or not ones more faithful to the OT or too fan-services than the other.
I mean, I firmly belief that TLJ is far more of a Luke film than a Rey film anyways, whether it was supposed to be or not, while SoM makes no bones about it (it’s even Luke’s story in the title!)
And it could be argued SoM is the purest distillation of fan service and nerdy lore-building defining audience-expectations... and thus the perfect candidate to show the kind of “The great Luke Skywalker and his laser sword” that TLJ poo-pooed, even as it actually ends up having a somewhat similar intellectual and philosophical objectives as TLJ on the service in regards to Luke.
Shadows of Mindor feels to me like it could be trotted out as the perfect counterargument and deconstruction of TLJ’s ideas and philosophies, accomplishing all their shared goals and scale, even while still being a bluntly crowd-pleasing story.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Yeah, the old Legends stuff has some pretty interesting things tht came out after Return of the Jedi. Like Luke having a family (not just Leia and Han), the rise of the new Jedi Order, etc.
Honestly kind of sad that the old Jedi Apprentice books are no longer canon (followed Obi-Wan and Qui Gon from the time the first two met up until just before Phantom Menace).
Honestly it does kind of bug me a bit that pretty much nothing really happens for about 25 years in Disney's post-ROTJ timeline, apart from "side stories" like the Mandalorian.
Granted, the characters having some kind crisis pretty much every year in the "Legends" EU did kind of get tiring after a while too....
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I'm about half way through the book so far and I'm enjoying it. It lost me for a sec when Luke first met "shadowspawn" and it was just some puppet but it reeled me back in pretty well shortly after that. I'll probably finish it in the next few days and give my overall opinion. So far I'd say it was a good recomendation.
Stuff’s happening for a lot of people... but it has extreme limitations for the Original Trilogy leads that gets capped off in the Sequel Trilogy in a way that’s hard to tie as a satisfactory cap to any post-OT adventures... in part because the Seauel Trilogy is hard to tie to the Original Trilogy as a satisfactory cap for those characters.
I think it’s easier for LFL to tell inter-Trilogy stories when they avoid Han, Leia, Luke, and Lando. Luke’s got this weird catch where weirdly, even though he’s supposed to be the main Jedi character and the only one by TLJ... it’s likely that creators want to keep any Jedi or Force characters they have between Trilogies *away* from Luke, because they have to be killed off if they’re near him when Ben’s around. I mean, does anyone really want to deal with the consequences of Baby Yoda being at Luke’s Jedi Temple? And considering how much Ahsoka’s reputation and fanbase has increased... does anyone really want her to be some unseen person at Luke’s temple when it gets blown up?
“Lords Shadowspawn” = “Lord Shadow’s Pawn” is pretty clearly Stover having some fun entirely for himself; it was a development that he came up with himself and had no basis in the lore work that the lore guys had built into the story already: they’d stacked in the black armored stormtroopers, the Mandos, and Cronal/Blackhole/Shadowspawn being the same guy.
Then Stover added in a “Labyrinthine Unstable Gravity Solar System,” TIE Defenders out the Whazoo, The Dark with a capital D, and pretty much everything else.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
I don’t know much about the lore of SW outside of the movies, clone wars and rebels. So for me this is all new. I will say that I feel like Stover has the characterization of everyone nailed down. Now if we are talking Marvel lore I’d say I’m well versed but SW I’m currently in a learning phase. If you have any resources to brush up on for the lore let me know!
If you want just sheer lore-work... than Wookieepedia is the way to go: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page
It basically contains all Star Wars articles, even those of dubious or former canonicity; even before Disney bought Star Wars, it kept tabs on old Marvel Comics events from the 80’s that hadn’t yet been referenced on other works, and the Infinities stories that were explicitly out of canon, and now? They keep a tag around to make sure you can look at articles that are Canon under the Disney banner, or non-canon-but-used-to-be under the Legends banner.
They’ve had source books out the wazoo for decades, but honestly Wookieepedia has all you’d really ever want there.
...And of you’d want some non-comic suggestions as to what to read for fun afterwards, here’s a pair of recommendations:
- Lost Stars by Claudia Grey: it was released shortly after TFA and provides a backstory for the regular Star Destroyer Rey passes on her speeder-bike early in TFA on Jakku... mostly by focusing on a pair of Imperial Academy students who hail from opposing cultures on the same home world, who end up becoming friends, then starting to fall for each other, then the Death Star happens and he leaves for the Rebellion while she convinces herself to stay with the Empire (with the twist being she’s the optimistic idealist from a rural family, while he’s a cynical pessimist, instead of the other way around.)
It’s one of the works that tends to be loved by everyone, regardless of their opinion around the rest of the current Disney canon.
- The Wraith Squadron series by Aaron Allston: Maybe the goofiest yet dramatic and heart-wrenching combination fighter pilot/espionage/Dirty Dozen series in the Legends canon. It’s start out kind of slow... but it ends up as a series that involves stuff like a deep cover Imperial infiltrator suffering an identity crisis after falling for the New Republic sniper whose really bad PTSD she’s responsible for, a former child actor from the Empire impersonating a pirate captain on mission where one of his lieutenants has to shoot one of their own, and a Republic Commander walking around a capital ship naked and slathered in Ewok chow.
No, I’m not explaining that last one, because people deserve to read it themselves.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Only problem with Lost Stars is that it is a bit "small universe" in a few ways, with the characters pretty much involved in almost *everything* that happens in the OT, and as noted, a bit of the ST too.
chrism227.wordpress.com Info and opinions on a variety of interests.
https://twitter.com/chrisprtsmouth