Asajj Ventress Novel Announced At SDCC 2014

At the San Diego Comic-Con Del Rey panel titled Star Wars: A New Dawn, referring to both the book and new storytelling era it kicks off, a brand new novel was announced. Based off unaired scripts from The Clone Wars animated show, the novel stars Asajj Ventress and Quinlan Vos, authored by Christie Golden. The tentative time frame of summer 2015 was given for its release. While the novel is the biggest thing from the panel, there was some information shared regarding thoughts on how to view ‘canon’ and some hints at possible sources storytellers are mining for new content, like Legends work or unaired/unproduced pieces.

Asajj Ventress went on a quick career changing path throughout the course of The Clone Wars series, as watching her turn from Dooku’s lackey, into Mother Talzin’s warrior, and eventually as a mercenary hoping to wipe her slate clean from Republic records and start fresh was one of most welcomed and surprising character focused things from the series. Her fate, among many others, was left tantalizingly open after the series ended so it’s refreshing to know we’ll see more of what they had in store for her (originally teased in this post from Dave Filoni at the official Star Wars blog).

The image found on Filoni’s post shows Quinlan Vos carrying Ventress, hence him co-hosting this novel with her. I haven’t read any of Vos’ comics, but I did readily enjoy his appearance in TCW S3, ep.5 “Hunt for Zirro,” where his sarcastic nature and cool ability to read memories from objects were put to excellent use. Why he and Ventress are together and why he’s carrying her, should be questions answered in the upcoming novel.

As for the author, Christine Golden got off on the wrong foot with most Star Wars fans (including me). It’s not easy to find fans of the Fate of the Jedi Legends series, of which Christine Golden made her Star Wars debut with and since I’m one of the many who didn’t enjoy the FotJ, Golden has a negative connotation in my mind. But that connotation is more from the story she had to work with than her writing skills, so I don’t think she’ll lead us wrong with an Asajj novel as both Vos and Asajj are much different characters than the wishy-washy and lovey-dovey Ben Skywalker and Vestara Khai, allowing Golden to flex some different writing muscles than teenage angst. On top of that, the story promises to cover “dark themes,” (not in a 50 Shades of Grey way) something which TCW was getting progressively good at towards the end of it’s run (seeing as the novel is based off scripts from unaired S7 material).

Ventress with hair (see the novel’s art above) was first seen in TCW S3, ep.12 “Nightsisters,” in a series of flashbacks. Filoni said in the novel panel that her shaved hair showed allegiance to Sith teachings, while she’s only had hair as a Jedi padawan and now interestingly enough in the upcoming novel.

The panel even went on to talk about how they might be heavily borrowing from the cancelled/in-limbo live-action Star Wars Underworlds series. Panel members also mentioned how they and the others working behind the scenes on the upcoming novels know how much the Legends stories mean to fans.

My favorite quote has to be this one by Filoni:

The Republic took Clones & makes them people. The Empire takes people & makes them Clones. AWESOME Filoni commentary. #StarWars #SDCC
— Justin Bolger (@TheApexFan) July 25, 2014

You can check out the panel live-blog from the official site or just listen to the whole thing over at TheForce.net!

Update: The entire panel is up for your viewing pleasure!

UPDATE 2 (7/11/2015): My review of Dark Disciple is up!

Ryan is Mynock Manor’s Head Butler. You can follow him on Twitter @BrushYourTeeth.

Asajj Ventress Novel Announced At SDCC 2014

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