Just over five years after the billion dollar grossing The Rise of Skywalker hit cinema screens around the world, Marvel have finally released the five-issue adaptation of Episode IX, and speaking with Laughing Place, artist Will Sliney explains some of the reasons why it was delayed for half a decade and the unique way he laid out this final (for now) saga movie adaptation.
LP: Today marks the release, finally, of your Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker adaptation. This was originally scheduled to come out in 2020, and we all know what was going on in the world in 2020. But can you tell me a little bit about what happened?
Sliney: Yeah, very simple: it just got paused and unpaused. Nothing in-between, except “Oh, I really hope this happens,” because I’ve really taken a different approach with this book than definitely any Star Wars project, or anything I’ve done before, and I can’t wait for people to see. We get to add in all this extra stuff to the lore [for one thing], but I’ve [also] tried to base all of the pages around the dyad and the reflection of the two characters, so a lot of panels are going to be laid out that way. There are certain Star Wars projects where you feel like you want to be as true and exact to what’s [on screen], whereas this one it was really about, “I’m going to really delve into a visual way of showing this reflection balance that these two characters have.
You’re going to see over the course of the five [issues] literally panel reflections and pose reflections and everything going out there in a way that you can only do in comics. There’s literally layouts of panels that you can put a mirror up to them, and they will mirror each other in that way. I was really gutted that that wasn’t going to get to come out. People are only going to start picking up on this as we go through the series and start to see all of these times when we got to do that, because obviously you can’t do it for the whole story. I think like you’ve seen I have a cover for issue two that’s out where you really can see the start of that– how everything is reflecting, so I can’t wait for people to see it.
We caught up with Will and fellow Marvel creative Ethan Sacks at New York Comic Con a couople of years back, a chat you can watch here.
