This past Friday, Newsarama posted a new interview with Star Wars Rebels executive producer Greg Weisman. In the interview, Weisman spoke about his work on the first season of Rebels, as well as developing the new Marvel Comics series Kanan.
The cover to the first issue of Marvel’s new series Kanan, with artwork by Pepe Larraz.
It was recently announced that Greg Weisman would not be returning to work on the second season of Star Wars Rebels, to the disappointment of many fans. However, fans would soon learn that Weisman would continue work in the Star Wars galaxy by writing a new comic book series focusing on one of the more dynamic characters in Rebels.
Newsarama’s Lucas Siegel sat down with Greg Weisman to discuss the further development of former padawan Kanan Jarrus.
From the Newsarama interview:
"“So we had all this great material that informed who these characters were, and it’s really important to come up with that stuff. Then it also becomes almost a bummer, because you’re like, “yeah, but now I want to tell all those stories, too!” So it’s really wonderful, it’s a gift that Lucasfilm and Marvel are letting me do this Kanan story. Because, wow, what great stories we have to tell about Kanan, and this is only one of them, really! It’s a great one, an important one, it shows how Kanan survived Order 66. It doesn’t bring him all the way up-to-date with the beginning of Spark of Rebellion, it’s not even attempting to do that. I covers about a year, give or take a few months, of Kanan’s life, from when he was – from just before and just after Order 66.”"
Weisman touched on the difficulties that Kanan might have in training his would be apprentice, Ezra Bridger, during the course of the Rebels television series:
"Kanan has doubts about Ezra, but Kanan has even more doubts about himself, and his abilities to be a mentor and Master – when he himself never achieved that rank! By the way, that’s been sort of spoiled, which I guess was kind of inevitable because people just kind of did the math, but our original intent was that we wouldn’t reveal to the audience that Kanan had never become a Jedi Knight or Master until way into the first season, and we wouldn’t reveal it to Ezra until after the audience found out.But it’s a significant thing; in the present of Rebels, he’s insecure, because he feels like he’s a fake. He’s doing his absolute best to train Ezra, but he feels a little bit like he’s an imposter, like he’s not good enough to mentor Ezra, because he never had the opportunity to finish his own training. The notion of training someone else is scary to him."
On whether he prefers working in television to working on comic books, Weisman gave some insight:
"It’s a fantastic medium. It does allow you, I think, to go deeper into certain things than you can on television. Mostly because, on TV, you have 22 minutes. You need to tell your story in 22 minutes, and boom, you’re done. You can have it be part of a larger arc, certainly, and that’s most of the work that I’ve been best known for has been done that way – episodic shows that have these great arcs to them. But it doesn’t leave you a lot of time to go off on tangents, or explore other aspects of characters – as with Rebels and all the backstories of these characters.So I love comics, you have an issue of a comic of standard length, about 20-22 pages, that’s about the equivalent of one act of a TV episode. So you need three issues to tell an equivalent story to one episode of TV. But you give me five issues, and I really have the room to take this story and really sink my teeth into it in a way that even on television I can’t, because I have three acts, not five. I have the elbowroom in a five issue comic series to tell a larger, more nuanced version of the story than I would’ve had in a single episode of a television show."
Finally, Weisman leaves fans with an idea of what they may find in the pages of the new Marvel series:
"Well, you can’t have a last padawan without a master, so I’m very excited about showing Kanan’s relationship with his master, Depa Billaba. It’s really cool, and really fun."
Make sure to read the entire interview by Lucas Siegel, here.
For more on Greg Weisman and his work on Star Wars Rebels, check out the great video below:
To learn more about Kanan Jarrus and his role on Rebels, watch this awesome video featuring Freddie Prinze, Jr.:
Don’t forget to tune into the second episode of Star Wars Rebels tonight on Disney XD! The new episode titled “Fighter Flight”, airs at 9:00 pm EST.