A Long Time Ago: An Ongoing Project

Some franchises are just massive. Eventually, they tend to reach the point where existing content and newly released material add up to make it physically impossible to consume everything in your lifetime. There is a degree of subjectivity to this, of course. If you have no job (or your job is literally to read books and play games), this limit can to take over a lifetime to reach, as you can easily consume over three hundred hours’ worth of content in a month, while if you work forty hours a week and read comics and watch movies as a hobby, it might be a struggle to indulge yourself in half that.

Depending on your capabilities, Star Wars is likely to be approaching that limit. By the time I was born, Star Wars had three completed comic series, two completed cartoon runs, at least seven feature length films (three worldwide theatrical releases, two UK theatrical releases, a television holiday special, and one or more documentaries), six video games, ten novels and several periodicals. And, of course, a well known parody by Mel Brooks that you might be familiar with. Not long afterward, the Star Wars expanded universe began to kick into high gear. Since then, over two hundred Star Wars books have been published, as well as four more theatrical films, several cartoons, and more periodicals and comic series than I can count.

During the next month a novel, five comic issues, two omnibi, and a magazine issue are being released – and that’s a slow, winter month over a year prior to the next film release. Despite this, I am going to do my best to get through the series before it becomes completely unmanageable. Each week, I will be focusing on another Star Wars book, comic, movie, television season, starting at the beginning of the series. That means that this week, I will start reviewing material from over twenty five thousand years prior to the original trilogy, with the Dawn of the Jedi series by John Ostrander, Jan Duursema, and Tim Lebbon.

I am titling this series of blog posts “A Long Time Ago”. Long-time readers of mine might be aware that a previous blog series held this title. This series ran from 2009 to the earliest days of 2013 on NJOE.com and MiBreviews.com (both now defunct), and featured only novels, beginning with Darth Bane: Path of Destruction and reaching as the Thrawn trilogy before it ceased to be. You can consider this to be “A Long Time Ago: Mark II”. The material this series focuses on will be much larger, and the looks much deeper, than the original allowed.

Unfortunately, money is sometimes tight, and there are thousands of dollars’ worth of material being covered by this series. That means that sometimes, I won’t be able to get a hold of something in time to review it. I can guarantee that these items will be the minority. If something is released shortly after I would have reviewed it (Dawn of the Jedi: Force War is an example of this), it will be decided on a case by case basis.

Thank you all for being with me. This is going to be a long journey; by my estimate, this journey will take us about ten years. The world as we know it now might be a completely different place from where we end up. And so it beings.