IDW writer Sam Maggs discusses working on the fan-fave Star Wars Adventures title and the fun that can be had writing for an established IP, which currently includes Star Wars, Marvel and Star Trek.
CBR: You’ve got Star Wars Adventures coming out through IDW Publishing. How is it to get to play in that galaxy far, far away?
Sam Maggs: It’s so much fun! I love the Lucasfilm team. They are so knowledgeable and so helpful. People are always like, “It must be so hard to write for these big IPs, they must limit you so much and be difficult!” But my experiences on both Star Wars Adventures and Marvel Action has been that they come to you as a writer because they like your style and know what they’re getting into up front and help you tell the best kind of story you want to tell. They’re not really there to tell me what to do, necessarily. I bring them ideas.
For example, my husband Blair Brown was a producer on Jedi: Fallen Order at Respawn Entertainment and I’m a big fan of Fallen Order and one of the planets in Fallen Order is Bogano and they have these cute, little creatures called boglings. When I played the video game with my husband, I was obsessed with the boglings so as soon as the opportunity to write children’s comics for Star Wars came up, I was like, “These cute things have to be in it!” It was cool to have that personal connection and Lucasfilm was totally into it and it was great to write early Luke and Leia. That sibling relationship is always really fun and they were really supportive of that as well.
Liana Kangas did the art on the book and she is so talented and brings a fun, loose style and Brittany Peer did the colors and it was so wonderful. I really love working with IDW on their all-ages comics, it’s such a fun opportunity to bring these stories to a really broad audience.
CBR: As someone that has the unique perspective of writing for both Star Wars and Star Trek, especially with Star Trek hitting its 55th anniversary this year, what commonalities do you see between the two as they welcome in new audiences?
Sam Maggs: I think they are similar but I just want to throw out there that I’m a Stargate person. I know objectively that I’m wrong but I do love Star Wars and Star Trek equally. [laughs] But I think they are similar in that they are these expansive universes that exist and each generation gets to add to it in a way that speaks to its current audience and that’s really an opportunity. The Star Trek story that I told was about reclaiming the lost history of a woman redshirt who, in the ’60s, we never really got to know what her story was because that was of the time and now we can get to do that.
Same with Star Wars Adventures, recognizing that kids of all genders are into Star Wars and write a story that embraces that. It’s like modern myth-making where you just get to add onto it as time goes on, there’s no limit to the stories we can tell in these cool, established universes. That’s what I like about IP writing too: It’s like playing with dolls as a kid. Those worlds existed and now I get to make-up stories in them, I love working in that sandbox.
Star Wars Adventures (2020) #7 (Francavilla Variant) @ ForbiddenPlanet.com
