The way we looked at it, I was the lead-off hitter. Jon Ostrander and Jan Duursema are batting clean-up at the end. Use whatever sports metaphor you want. What happens in our two chapters (Knight of the Old Repubic and Legacy) are clearly the bookends. We did bring Mick Harrison and Rob Williams (of Star Wars: Dark Times and Rebellion) in on the discussions at various points, but it was more important at the beginning that we figured out what the very start and the ending of the story were.
When we finally had our big launch meeting, we spent the most time and attention on my chapter. I went through several drafts over the course of the year on this thing. One of the things that we continued to work toward was that you don't have to know what's going on in each individual series when you get to its chapter.
The elements of Knights of the Old Republic that have gone on so far are relevant to what happens in "Vector". If you're a regular reader of the series, you'll walk into "Vector" knowing how the characters got where they are and who they are, but we also wanted to introduce them afresh in "Vector" itself for each of the titles. It was not going to be something where you're really just picking up a regular issue of the series, and suddenly there's this cross-over grafted onto it. If you look at my initial drafts, they were very much more continuations of things that I had going on that had to be explained, and we chose to not to follow some of those things up.
Did this mean you had to introduce a break into your story?
A month has passed between issues #24 and #25 of Knights of the Republic. The decision to jump it a month only came later on. In issue #24, we're right at the climax of an important series of events in the life of Zayne Carrick and the lives of those on Taris. We have the resistance getting defeated by a sneak attack by Cassus Fett, leading a Mandalorian charge. Zayne has just reconciled with an old girlfriend who thought he had killed her brother. All these things have just happened, and I was very anxious in the beginning to pick up the threads I had left and show what the next day was like. I realized that was jut too much. So as we went forward, we increasingly looked at which things we could settle off-panel and elsewhere.
We realized the fun of it will be, if we go forward a month, there will be an interesting series of mysteries for the regular readers as well. What has happened in the interim? They know that Cassus Fett was leading a sneak attack and the same time Zayne and his friends were leading an attack on his base. There are a lot of questions about what happened to all those people. Zayne's friends who were in orbit waiting for them... they're gone. Where are they? Where did they go? How is it that Zayne and Gryph have been lost in the Undercity for weeks at a time? Anybody who's played the video game knows that the Undercity is not a place to take your vacation.
That's one of the things we learned and realized going forward. We wanted this story to be an important event in the lives of all these characters and the galaxy and this period. We wanted it to not just be something where people can come in cold and understand it but to actually have it flow really well. When somebody picks up "Vector" from the beginning, it's not going to have those little things we don't do in comics anymore: the little captions that say "This happened in issue #24! Go get it!" Someone might mention an incident at Flashpoint, but we're not going to tell you what that event was. If you want to go get it, though, go get it.
That really recalls to me the very first issue of X-Men that I ever bought back when I was a teenager: issue #155. I'll never forget it. A couple of characters are just having a conversation. They haven't seen each other in months. One character says, "What happened to Jean Grey? Where's she? I haven't seen her." The other character gets a somber look on her face, and the caption reads, "And once again the story of Dark Phoenix is told." And that's it! They don't say what it was. I realized I had to go back and get these earlier issues, because every time this thing is mentioned, it's never explained, but you can tell what it meant to the characters.
When we refer to Serreco and the Mandalorians nuking the planet against the protestations of Zayne Carrick who was trying to get everyone to evacuate, we just have to mention it. We don't have to run the newsreel footage of the whole thing. That's what this is about. We want to get people interested in these characters so they'll follow them going forward, and we want to get people interested in the background to a degree so they'll want to pick up the trade paperbacks going backwards.
Does this affect which characters appear and when? I notice that Pulsifier returns later on, and that calls back an earlier storyline.
At the end of the second year of Knights of the Old Republic, we've got a fair-sized cast. It's a team book in many senses by the time we get to this point. One of the things that we did in addition to leaping forward a month is that we zeroed in on two of the characters, Zayne and Gryph, so not to hit people with this huge cast right away. In issue #25, we see Zayne's situation with the Covenant that's hunting him, but as far as the good guys go, it's really just Zayne and Gryph.
