Star Wars The Way You Remember It: Dark Horse Previews Star Wars #1 By Brian Wood

As part of an interview with Nerdist, Star Wars writer Brian Wood debuted three new pages of art from the upcoming series, which debuts in January and takes place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. It's the first time that Lucasfilm has allowed the comics to go back and pick up the toys of the original trilogy in quite that way since Marvel was doing Star Wars comics around the time the films were in theaters. When the project was first announced, Wood said that he intended to write the series as though he were doing so in a vacuum where only the first movie had happened, and some fans inferred that to mean that he was writing an alternate universe where he could take off from there without concern for the sequels or the Expanded Universe. Wood told Nerdist that's not what he meant at all. "I've had to clarify that statement so many times!  By that quote what I meant to say is that IN THE CHARACTER'S MINDS, nothing has happened since the events of the first film. Luke and Leia don't know they're siblings, Vader doesn't know Luke exists, and so on. Which is a challenge."

He added that one of the great challenges of working on the project is not only fitting it into the existing continuity but living up to reader expectations. "And doing right by Randy Stradley, my editor, who has written a fair share of Star Wars himself, and that can be intimidating," Wood added. "When I started the job, I had this idea that Star Wars fans would be really hardcore and nitpicky and, to be frank, ready to challenge my work. Then I went to Star Wars Celebration, this convention, and I had one of the most positive experiences of my professional life. Everyone was super nice, very receptive to what I'm doing, and I felt like I belonged in a way that comic book conventions don't. I came home from that show determined to write 10x on this title." Star Wars launches in January. Oh, yeah, and there's a new movie or something.