Happy New Year!

You may have seen the recent Clone Wars / Dark Horse Comics news, and I thought I would chime in and clarify things a bit. I am very excited about our collaboration with Dark Horse and this opportunity to tell an unfinished story developed for the TV series.

Before we get into the details about the Maul comic, I’d like to make clear that this storyline does not represent The Clone Wars series finale. I’ve seen some confusion about that online and want to set the record straight. There are additional Clone Wars episodes on the way and one arc in particular marks the series finale in my mind. We’ll have fun discussing that in the not too distant future.

Allow me to reveal in more detail what the story “Darth Maul, Son of Dathomir” is, and where it came from. As I have mentioned in previous interviews, for us to create the rich and incredibly complex stories that we were telling during The Clone Wars, we would be working on around fifty episodes at one time. This is from rough outline form, all the way through final sound design and picture lock. There were several stories that had gone through a substantial amount of development when the series was ended. We realized that this meant certain character arcs would go unfinished, but the Story and Publishing teams at Lucasfilm approached me with a unique way to continue Maul’s story for everyone who had been faithful to the show. The idea was to tell the story in comic book form, and knowing the great work that Dark Horse had done over the years, I thought it was an excellent plan.

The story of Darth Maul had become an important one for the series and it was only fitting that we chose him for a comic adaptation. The comics will be based on four finished scripts that were written for Season 6. These scripts came out of one of our story conferences with George Lucas. As they moved through the production pipeline, they became finalized scripts with a great deal of the actual design work completed. The designs you will see, the plot lines, and character development in these comic books are all coming directly from the TV production. I turned over all of the art to Dark Horse so they could create an accurate representation of what we were planning for the show.

I am thrilled with the result, and thankful that we could partner with Randy Stradley and his team on this project. As I have always said, the stories told during the Clone Wars era will live on, and we are eager to share Darth Maul’s storyline with you. Is it the final story for Darth Maul? You will have to read the comics to find out.