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Star Wars: Knight Errant #2
"AFLAME" PART 2
As with all my “production notes,” consider a “Spoiler Warning” attached. Please read the books first.
Out
of the frying pan of #1, and
into the fire. Issue #2 of Knight Errant
sends Kerra forward on her mission -- or, at least, her mission as she
understands it -- despite the deaths of everyone she arrived with.
One of the more important things to convey in this issue was the nature
of the oppressed people on Chelloa. Having studied a lot of
totalitarian states, I knew there was a wide range of ways to portray
the subject people and their attitudes. Here, I didn't want to show a
people ripe for rebellion; it's more North Korea than 1989 Eastern
Europe. The people in this region had spent such a long time under
various Sith Lords, the will to resist is basically gone; there is no
hope for overthrow, partially because the Jedi order isn't around.
Gorlan supplies hope of a different sort, helping people to make it to
the next day.
We meet Daiman this issue. I'd imagined Daiman as a mash-up between
Alexander the Great and Caligula, with a healthy amount of Narcissus
thrown in. The universe is his video game, and just about every move he
makes involves a certain child-like curiosity: "What happens if I do
THIS?" It can, as Odion observes, make him oblivious to certain
important details -- but as we're beginning to see, Daiman is no
stranger when it comes to making cold calculations, himself.
Daiman lives for his own amusement; it's pretty obvious in their
encounter in his palace that this Sith Lord isn't really in any danger
from Kerra, who's been a Jedi Knight for all of a week. She's a
creature the likes of which he's never seen before. He lets her speak
-- for a while, anyway.
Visually, we wanted to show a lot of ash flying around; I provided the
artist with images of lava fields and volcanic activity. If Jenith
isn't quite Pompeii, it's on the bus route!
TRIVIA
- The Republic Hammerhead cruiser seen in the
opening flashback
recalls the design seen in the KOTOR era -- but it's not the exact same
kind. We haven't characterized what it is or what it's doing here, but
you can imagine a few possibilities. The Republic could be down to
using mothballed ships -- or perhaps it's just that certain shapes of
vessels recur because they offer tactical advantages. (Hence, all those
triangular-looking capital ships!)
- The original design for
Daiman -- which can be seen in issue #0 -- gave
him a little more of an
unkempt punk look. We altered the look a bit for his debut here;
Daiman's pretty big on looking nice (even if it's just so he can admire
the image in the mirror).
- Daiman's eyes are mismatched,
something that's touched on in the novel and
the chapter of it that's
reprinted in #0.
But Michael Atiyeh
came up with a visual device where
both of his eyes go Sithy whenever he's using Force lightning.
- Gorlan's
got a real Kris
Kristofferson thing going this issue. No, I didn't have
a specific actor in mind in imagining his character, but I figured he'd
be one of those hard-bitten guys who's seen a lot of strife.
- The
mechanism for the Kinetic Corruptor revealed here was inspired in part
from reading about how natural gas was freed from shale. It struck me
that if a mythical explosive
compound were being mined, some kind of injection device might be
imagined to trigger a reaction. Obviously, whatever happens to the
baradium doesn't require oxygen underground; I'll leave it to
a
chemist to figure out what's really happening!
- Don't look for Knights of the Old Republic
connections in "Aflame," but I can't deny the nod in "I'm not a grifter
-- I'm a Jedi."
- The
ten sites Gorlan mentions appear on the surface map of the mining zone
on Chelloa in the Knight Errant Essential Atlas
Supplement Note that the
lake had already been drained in the initial mining; the spaceport and
surrounding area -- up to the edge of Jenith -- is part of the blast
zone after #1.
- The Mobile Munitions Complex is partially
inspired by the pyramidal shell that the NASA Mars rovers land in. The
walls petal open to reveal a larger area inside.
- My assumption is that Gorlan uses the macrobinoculars in his work for the mining operations; that's why he has the set here.
