Star Wars Books Tying Into Rogue One, More Announced

At Star Wars Celebration Europe, the Star Wars Publishing panel brought with it both insight into recent releases and announcements of upcoming books. With Rogue One: A Star Wars Story freshly on minds of fans after the exciting panel that closed out Friday at the show, Saturday brought with it news of tie-ins that will support the film's release.

First up, though, were the young reader books, which retell classic scenes from the original trilogy along with new illustrations. Star Wars: Trapped in the Death Star for example, features Luke and Leia in their daring swinging escape on the cover. A mid-level for slightly older kids will actually adapt older readers' novels into illustrated young reader books. Weapon of the Jedi is being adapted by its original writer Jason Fry into Luke and the Lost Jedi Temple (includes stickers!). There will also be one focusing on Leia (adapting Moving Target) and ones planned for Poe Dameron and Han Solo.

Brian Rood's visual novel adaptations of the films come with storybook and CD read-alongs, intended for readers around the age of 8. His photo-realistic art will be used to adapt all seven films in the saga so far.

Abrams publishing's Star Wars: Art of Ralph McQuarrie comes this year. The previously announced book (actually a set of two hardcover volumes) will include every piece of art McQuarrie made for Star Wars - over 2,000 individual pieces of art. Every piece was re-scanned or re-photographed (for the Matte paintings), giving the highest-quality presentation of the images ever released to the public. Lost interviews with the artist are also included, alongside the relevant art.

The Adventures in Wild Space series from Egmont UK publishing are original to the UK. Cavan Scott and Tom Huddleston have written those five novels, intended for 7-10 year olds, set during the "Dark Times" between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Rebels. It follows two children who are explorers in the wild frontiers of the Star Wars galaxy. The editor at Egmont described pitching it to the Story Group in a conference call as "being called before the Jedi Council." Each book covers a different subgenre of storytelling featuring the kids, like political thriller, monster movie, heist, and horror.

Egmont UK is also doing Star Wars: Galactic Atlas, an over-sized 80-page hardcover has an in-universe story to it as well, with an Ithorian artist having drawn all of the maps, which re-tell stories from all the movies, The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Marvel's comics from the last year and a half - it features story elements from "every canonical story" that they could use - it even features maps of new areas and planets from Rogue One. "There are even a couple of illustrations that are the first time we've seen some characters visually represented," promised Story Group's Matt Martin.

DK Books has new visual dictionaries for adult fans, like the cross-section full Star Wars Complete Locations, which includes closer than ever looks at Jakku, Starkiller Base, Rey's AT-AT home, and more. Star Wars: Year by Year is an updated and expanded edition of what they previously published under that name, now with The Force Awakens content, and updates for the other releases of 2015 and 2016, like the comics, novels, and basically everything Star Wars.

Short story tie-ins for Star Wars Aftermath: Life Debt will be hitting in the next two issues of Star Wars Insider, and a Rogue One tie-in story called "Voice of the Empire" will be in the issue released just days after the film. "Blade Squadron: Jakku" will come out next year, tying-in to the third Aftermath novel.

Elsewhere, the new Star Wars: Backstories books are biography style stories about Princess Leia and Darth Vader, written as if they're real people. Phil Noto does the covers of those, and Jason Fry wrote the Darth Vader book.

Finally, covers for Star Wars: Catalyst, a Rogue One tie-in, plus several from DK and Disney publishing were revealed, which you can see in the image above.