Charles Soule Looks Back

Since Marvel returned to publishing Star Wars comics in 2015, few writers have made as great an impact on the galaxy far, far away as Charles Soule. The scribe took his first steps with 2016’s Lando, a five-issue miniseries that garnered significant acclaim. From there, Soule’s Star Wars star continued to rise, as he racked up credits including Poe Dameron, The Rise of Kylo Ren, War of the Bounty Hunters, and more, often with major contributions to lore; when it came time to shape what would become the Star Wars: The High Republic initiative, Soule was one of five writers recruited as an architect of its first stories. Today, Soule is at the helm of Marvel’s flagship Star Wars series, which is celebrating a milestone along with its writer: Star Wars #25, now available, is Soule’s 100^thStar Wars comic. And it’s no ordinary issue. The comic includes four short stories that all see Soule return to characters from his prior runs — Obi-Wan and Anakin, Darth Vader and Palpatine, Kylo Ren, and Poe Dameron — while reuniting with the artists from each respective title. To mark the occasion, starwars.com spoke with Soule about hitting the 100-issue mark, why Ben Solo bleeding his kyber crystal was so important, and why two stories from Star Wars #25 will be particularly “resonant.”

starwars.com: To start, I want to say congratulations on the milestone. That’s pretty amazing. What does it mean to you?

Charles Soule: When all of this occurred to me, it was really just late last year, probably. I was just, “I wonder how many of these things I’ve written,” and I just started adding it up because it was something that you do to procrastinate from doing the actual work of writing the issues. I realized how close I was to writing a hundred. Like, I was very, very close. I think, when I ran the numbers, it was like 97 or something like that. And so I was like, “Man, that’s crazy.” And then I did some more procrastination slash research slash analysis, and looked to see what some of the other prominent Star Wars comic book writers had done. And I realized that, at least in the modern canon, no one else had gotten there.

It meant to me that I had kind of definitively done what I always wanted to do in Star Wars, which was to make a mark, contribute in some significant way to this thing that I’d loved since I was really little. And you don’t have to write a hundred comics to do that. You can do that with one story. You can do that by being a fan. You can do that by loving Star Wars, however you want to love it. You don’t have to do this thing. But for me, it just felt like a really solid, real milestone that made me feel really good. I mean, that’s thousands of pages of material, thousands of pages of story that I got to create with some of the best artists in all of comics, and told stories that resonated with the fans, and have really given me the Star Wars career I have today, which is significant and goes beyond comics.

So it felt great, I guess, which is what I could have said very quickly [Laughs.] as opposed to going through that long spiel. Certain things happen in your career that bring things home for you in a way, right? That make it clear to you where you are or what you’ve achieved, or maybe how your work is received, that pull you out of the day to day, constant applied effort of making the stuff. And for me, this really was one of those, realizing that I had done or was about to do 100 of them….

…For the Full Article/Interview Head On Over to The Official Star Wars Site

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