Review Fix Exclusive: John Ostrander Q & A: Agent of the Empire: Part I

Review Fix recently spoke with Dark Horse’s John Ostrander about working within the Star Wars Extended Universe, how to gain George Lucas’ approval, morally ambiguous characters, and his new comic book title “Agent of the Empire.”

Review Fix: Agent of the Empire was a lot of fun to read. It immediately struck me that this character is sort of a good guy of the empire. He’s going around sniffing out corruption and he’s a spy for the good of the empire. How did you come up with the story behind this title?

John Ostrander: My editor, Randy Stradley, and I were talking. I said, ‘well how about James Bond meets Star Wars, an imperial agent?’ He liked that a lot. It gives us a chance to set it about three years before A New Hope: Episode 4, or as it is sometimes referred to, the “original” Star Wars movie. That way we could play in that continuity without getting our feet tripped by it and make it accessible to, hopefully, people like you who are not aware of all the other stuff that’s going on.

I took that idea and it’s amazing because of how much James Bond matches up with Star Wars. You have several exotic locales usually in each movie; you have an over-the-top villain, you have a charismatic hero; you have chases, action, and a touch of romance; they overlap pretty well. And I thought that doing it from the imperial point of view, would give us a chance to take a look at some of the material in a fresh way.

Review Fix: Certainly. In the movies, the empire is always so cold and masculine and just grim. It seems like a terrible place to be, even for the people who want to be there.

Ostrander: Well, I’m not saying that empire isn’t evil, but I think you can have someone of good will working for it. Nobody thinks of themselves or what they’re doing as evil. Our hero, Jahan Cross, has reasons that will come out in this first arc, as to why he supports the empire, and he does. There are certain things that it does that he is aware of but over all he thinks it’s a good thing. He doesn’t think of it as evil; and in supporting it he’s doing something good for the empire and thus for the galaxy. Now he may be wrong, but that’s his approach.

Review Fix: Have you used that angle before, or was focusing on a bad guy’s own perspective of the right that he thinks he’s doing a fresh concept for you?

Ostrander: Well I have done Darth Vader individual shots before, but the usual characters that I do are not squeaky-clean heroes. I created my own character a number of years ago called Grimjack who is still published now and then. He was never a particularly squeaky-clean hero. I’ve worked with the whole espionage idea before, not only in Star Wars but also in other comics. I’ve been at this for about 25 years and I like that sort of gray area there where someone is not perfectly good, not perfectly bad, but kinda floats back and forth; because I think that’s most of our lives.

Review Fix: The flawed hero is of course very well liked. I don’t know if it’s common but it’s certainly powerful and often used because it is so realistic. But you don’t often see the flip side of the slightly-good bad guy.

Ostrander:  Yeah, and that can be very fun to write. You know usually the villains get the best lines. [They do] that stuff that we go, ‘well I wouldn’t do that,’ but secretly deep down you sometimes have had the urge. The villain often speaks to some part of us that we don’t always like to admit is there. Darth Vader is one of the most charismatic characters in all of the Star Wars stories,

Review Fix: I think he’s everybody’s favorite.

Ostrander: The three prelude movies really turned the entire Star Wars saga into his saga. In the original trilogy it looked like Luke’s, but it’s not. It really is Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader and his arc.

Review Fix: Do you have favorite character types; maybe between super powers or natural powers; or good or bad; or both, or neither?

Ostrander:  The flawed hero, the bad good guy or the good bad guy, is the sort that I like to explore most. Powers, to me, is just an aspect of the story telling. When you’re getting right down to the character, you have to look at what the character is about, with or without powers. The powers either enhance the story telling or they don’t, but if you make them the center of the story, then I think you’re in trouble.

Review Fix: Tell me more about how Agent of the Empire came about.

Ostrander: Like I said, I talked with my editor about it, and once he gave me a go-ahead to develop it, then I had to come up with a main character and how is he like James Bond. But also I’m influenced by the Bourne movies, the old Secret Agent series, the writer John le Carré. So I’m going to try and work all those aspects into it. Then not only did my editor have to approve, but everything that I do has to get approved by Lucas Film Licensing, which handles all these licensees for the main company.

Review Fix:What’s that like?

Ostrander: Actually for me pretty good. I’ve been doing this 10 years or more.

Review Fix: Dealing with Lucas?

Ostrander: Yeah, and I’ve established a relationship with Lucas Film. They know who I am, they know what I do; they feel they can trust me. Basically I try to make sure that it feels like Star Wars, no matter what else I’m doing. So it’s not bad really, I rarely get things flat out rejected. I may get: ‘no that’s not quite right.’ We sweat the details quite a bit.

Review Fix: Does George Lucas come to personally approve or disapprove everything?

Ostrander: No. I am told that has read the comics, and I’m sure that if he has read them and he didn’t like them, I would hear about it. But no, the people who approve it are actually the people at Lucas Film Licensing.

Review Fix: I always wondered how much personal involvement he has with all the Lucas Film things, because there are so many.

Ostrander: Basically, my understanding of his take on It, is that he lets us do what we want for the most part, so long as it conforms to the basic feel and concepts, in what is known as the ‘extended universe.’ That’s anything outside of the movies or the stuff that George Lucas himself does. And, if he wants to change something, he’ll change it. He lets us play in his sandbox, but it is his sandbox.

Review Fix: Fair enough. How about after that? Are you focused on Agent of the Empire right now, or do you have something else in the works?

Ostrander: Well I have a second series that I’m working on with my artist Jan Duursema who I’ve worked with for about 10 years on Star Wars. We have a new series that will be out in February called Dawn of the Jedi, in which we’re going to go back to the origins of the Jedi Order, and how they came together and what they were like in the early days, and what transformed them from what they were at the beginning to what we know them now as.