I'm seeing yet another new Daredevil #1 and Punisher #1? The volumes are becoming cumbersome. I'm not buying anything new with a $6.99 cover....at least initially, not when one of my sources has fairly regular sales and I can get as much as 75% off a few months later. That's how I got the Harley Annual from last year, $6.99 cover, under $2 in a sale, perfect NM bagged and boarded. My current new issue pull-list is less than 5. I will still blow $100 on random new issues of interest but not at cover price, or cost price with my dealer, but when I can swing a much better deal.

Eh, Lucas had accumulated a fairly substantial compost heap by the time he sold it.  Outside of the Timothy Zahn material and some of the Dark Horse stuff, I didn't think much of the vast majority of Star Wars material, post-Jedi.

I think there is more than enough blame for the mess of later Star Wars to spread around, beyond Kathleen Kennedy.  Even Lucas was afraid to do anything interesting with it.  For my money, the acme of Star Wars is Archie Goodwin's material.  He got what drew audiences to Star Wars (the original), gave it some depth and added some interesting new characters to it and then just churned out great stories, in the comic books and newspaper strips.  Zahn had a similar feel.  I never read Mike Stackpole's Rogue Squadron books; but, I heard good things about them.  Other than Splinter of the Mind's Eyes and the early Han Solo adventures, from Brian Daley, you can keep the rest of the books and all of the prequels and sequels.

Lucas also crapped out a pretty mediocre Indiana Jones, at the end and I couldn't sustain much interest in the tv series.

With Dark Horse, I liked some of the minis, fun stuff, like Tag & Bink and some of Kevin Rubio's short pieces in Star Wars Tales, Vader's Quest, one or two of the alternate versions of the movies and the rest varied.  Goodwin had the luxury of creating before Lucas really knew what the hell he was going to do in a sequel and he created better characters and plots, before Lucasfilm stepped on his toes about similar plot elements.  I think Lucas would have been well served to get more people like Archie in to help craft stories to be turned into screenplays, since he hated the writing so much.

For the life of me, I don't understand why they (they collectively referring to any and all of Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, and all others involved) didn't lift the bones of the EU novels for the ST. Specifically, cleaning up empire remnants, Luke rebuilding the Jedi order/academy, and the legacy characters GRADUALLY passing the torch to the next generation, especially in such a nostalgia-loving environment as we are in. It was all right there, it was good, and people wanted to see the characters they fell in love with again.

Speaking for myself, I wanted to see Jedi Master Luke Skywalker get his due, to see the fruits of his labor and the fulfillment of the prophecy. I did not want to see a broken, bitter old man drinking blue milk from an alien's teet.

Why they thought a hollow rehash of A New Hope, a heavy-handed attempt at """subversion""" and whatever the hell Rise of Skywalker ended up being is what ANYONE wanted to see is beyond me.

I think they're all to blame! Kennedy dropped the ball, and if the buck stops with her, it's ultimately her responsibility, but let's also not pretend George was still burning the A-material in his tank, either.

And I get why he wanted to sell it. IIRC from interviews and articles, he knew he was getting on in years and wanted the property to have stewards who would have longevity to keep it around and would keep the spirit of it going as much as anyone but him could.

That said, to me, his face looked full of PAINFUL REGRET in nearly every photo of him I've seen around, during, and after the sale, so I don't think he wanted to nor would he have if he had another 50 years to live.

Well, that's why Baskin Robbins has 31 flavors.  My personal experience with the EU stuff I tried, in prose form, beyond Zahn, was pistachio and sludge.  Dark Horse had much better material, though a good portion of it juts felt like wheel spinning, since they couldn't mess too closely with anything anyone really wanted, rather than in the deep past or far afield.

Still, I felt the early works, in prose and comics, had a better handle on the space opera elements and better characterization.  Archie Goodwin excelled at it, Alan Dean Foster could write anything and Brian Daley did a pretty good Han Solo.

I tried the new stuff as it came out and Zahn's material was great, then it dropped off significantly enough that I swore off reading any more of it, because, obviously, the editors and Lucasfilm weren't going to let anyone do anything interesting and most of it read like bad fantasy...not sci-fi, not space opera, just bad fantasy.  Force witches and other silliness.  A consequence of that was skipping Stackpole's Rogue Squadron books, which I heard were good and sounded a little more up my alley; but, I had far too many other books I knew I wanted to read to get around to them.

Harsh?  Maybe; but burned too often makes you a harsh critic when they come a courtin' again.  After the Special Edition monkeyshines, I was pretty skeptical going into the prequels and was pretty well justified in that sentiment.

A cynic is an optimist who got tired of getting kicked in the goolies.

"The Truce at Bakura" is a combination of words I had forgotten existed. Blast from the past.

And yeah, I wouldn't have wanted them to copy literally all of the EU, but the bones of a logical and good next trilogy were easily already there.