2008 is the year of "Vector", a 12-part story that will weave its way through all four regular Star Wars comics titles from Dark Horse: Knights of the Old Republic, Dark Times, Rebellion and Legacy. It's no small task when you realize that covers over 4,100 years of the Star Wars timeline. How can one event cover that much time?

Readers get their start on the "Vector" storyline this week, with the release of Knights of the Old Republic #25. Writer John Jackson Miller recently caught up with StarWars.com to discuss his involvement with this multi-title event.

This is the first time Star Wars comics have attempted anything like a cross-over. Where there any lessons learned from recent ventures like Marvel's Civil War or D.C.'s 52, or any other cross-overs for that matter?

The comic book cross-over really goes way back. It goes back to when Marvel did a war between the Avengers and the Defenders. That was a big deal. The whole idea of the team book long before that -- Justice League, for example -- was a kind of a cross-over, with all these different characters. Really, it wasn't until the really big cross-overs of the '80s where you had to keep track of where everybody was, and get them to the place where they had to be. Marvel had Secret Wars, and D.C. had Crisis on Infinite Earths. These were supposed to be huge events affecting everybody, but the trick to them was that they were being printed simultaneously with the books involved.

If we're talking about lessons learned or things we wanted to avoid, that was always one of the potential pitfalls. The events of those cross-overs would, in those days, not really interlace with was going on from month-to-month. In the case of Secret Wars, everybody just left.

But the monthly titles kept going.

What happened is they all went to the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, they all vanished, and when they all came back, suddenly Spider-Man had a different costume, and the Thing is no longer part of the Fantastic Four and She-Hulk is! All of these things happened within their titles, but they weren't going to happen until the end of Secret Wars, which was still eight or nine issues down the road. So it was kind of strange.

When you get into the '90s, and the more recent cross-overs, they figured out ways to have them going simultaneously. What happens in one issue will interact with that current monthly issue of the related title. That gets to be a very complicated dance too, because what if one of those books comes out late?

I think that was what [Dark Horse Editor] Randy [Stradley] was trying to avoid when he came up with the notion of, "Let's do something where it's one story that goes through all four series, but they don't go through all four simultaneously in continuity -- they can't, because it's four different time periods -- and they also don't happen simultaneously on the calendar."

Even though this is a story that takes place in 12 issues of four different series, it's not the January-through-April issues of the four series.

It's more like a relay race.

Absolutely, that's exactly it. It's more like a relay race. I'm straining to think of something similar to it in other comics elsewhere. The whole purpose of the cross-over in the past was to force you to buy the other copies of the other books that month. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to do a story that would take you through these other periods, so that if you followed along it would give you a sense of what it's like to read a story in this series, in this time period, by this creative team.

I'm not even sure if cross-over is the right word. It's really more of a cross-through. It's a story that cascades from one to the next. That's why it's interesting.

The challenges we had to face were the obvious ones. It's four different time periods. We had to figure out a way to do that without breaking the rules established for this universe. We wanted this to have some emotional weight, so that it wasn't something like "Zayne Carrick loses his library book and years later, Luke Skywalker finds it under the Jabba the Hutt's couch." We wanted to make it hang together both as a larger story, and individual stories. You had those challenges going on, so it took us a good year to put it together.