Darth Vader learning it was his son Luke Skywalker who destroyed the Death Star. The surprise introduction of Han Solo’s supposed wife. And Princess Leia finding the last remaining citizens of Alderaan. These are key moments in Star Wars lore, but they’re not in any of the movies. They’re all products of Marvel Comics’ line of Star Wars comics that kicked off in 2015 and have been making contributions to the canon ever since. But even though these Star Wars comics have been a hit with fans and are selling quite well , it required two media juggernauts, Marvel and Lucasfilm, to learn to work together even though they have a very different way of doing things.

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While there are many who work to help make the Star Wars comics happen, it’s Marvel editor Jordan D. White who oversees the entire line. He works closely with those at Lucasfilm to help craft stories that fit before, after, and in-between the movies. During a phone interview with White, he explained how the different storytelling philosophies of Marvel and Lucasfilm created some challenges. Both companies are obviously industry leaders in what they do, but they go about doing it with unique approaches that, at first look, don’t automatically gel with one another. Yet even when recalling how the two company’s mindsets were sometimes in opposition to one another, White never expressed feelings of frustration or that one was forcing their will on the other (no pun intended). His stories sound more like two musicians sitting down to play together for the first time and enjoying the process of finding perfect harmony.Check out our chat with White where he explains the initial guiding philosophy of the Star Wars comics line and how it has evolved over the years, what factors go into deciding what comics get made and what type of comic they will be, and how they decide which era(s) to focus their efforts on, all while offering perspective from both sides of the coin.

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Our main idea was twofold. One is to make books that feel as much like you’re watching the movies as possible, but also to do it in a Marvel way. We certainly have stuck to trying to make them feel as much like the movies as possible, for sure. But we probably don’t push the exact Marvel processes as much as we do, because we’ve adapted more to Lucasfilm’s ways as well. Marvel and Lucasfilm both have very different philosophies of how to approach coming up with stories, and how to approach continuity especially. So I think when we started out, we were like, well, here’s how we work, and they were like, oh, interesting. And over time we’ve both learned about how each other do it, and we’ve come up with a way that works with both of us.Because the root of their stories and continuity are in movies, they’re grounded by the reality of moviemaking in a way that we, because we are based in comics, are not. What do I mean by that? The easiest example is that actors age, and so if you wanna make a new Star Wars movie 40 years after the original Star Wars movie, the guy playing Luke Skywalker either has to be a different guy, or he’s got to be significantly older. Whereas we can make comic books about Spider-Man relatively close to the same age he was. Well, he’s not in high school anymore, so he’s aged a bit, but relatively close to the age he was 40 years ago, for sure. We just wanna say, you can tell an infinite number of stories in one length of time, and they’re a little bit more geared towards coming up with and filling out a timeline.And in addition, the fact that their stories take place at different points on the same timeline. There’s no present of Star Wars, other than, perhaps, you might think the present is the current trilogy, but then you look at, well, what other movies just came out? Rogue One just came out, that takes place earlier. Solo’s about to come out, that takes place earlier. They jump around on that timeline and tell stories all over the place. For the most part, the Marvel storytelling takes place in just, now, across the board. Obviously we do flashback stories, but the bulk of what we do all takes place now. And we definitely brought that philosophy to Star Wars. That’s why, when we started the line, we said, the bulk of the stories we’re telling are gonna take place in a “now.” We’re gonna pick a now, and we’re gonna stick to it. And we have, to some extent, but not completely across the board.What that makes difficult is things like a crossover. If we want to have an X-Men crossover, all the X-Men books take place now, we don’t have to worry about it. It’s easy, they all meet up at a place and they fight. If we wanted to do that in Star Wars, it becomes very tricky, because how do you do a crossover between Darth Vader and Poe Dameron? You kind of can’t. Or if you do, it’s got to be a very different kind of crossover. So we’ve been thinking about that kind of thing too, but it definitely takes a change of philosophy from where we started.They come from all different places. At this point we’ve done quite a few minis. Some of them have been writers pitching us an idea for a character. Like, we know we wanna work with this writer, and then they go, well, here’s an idea I have for this character. Others have been us, Marvel editorial, saying, here’s what we wanna do, a book about this, and then we find a writer, and we pitch it to Lucasfilm. Other times, Lucasfilm says, hey, you know, it would make sense for you to do this at this time, tying in with this movie or this videogame or this TV show. And we said, absolutely, sure, let’s do it. So, they come from all different places.That’s a complicated question to answer. Because I mentioned differences in Marvel and Lucasfilm philosophies. An ongoing comic book series was something that is relatively foreign to their way of thinking. When we, on the Marvel side of things, just a regular Marvel comic, go, we’re gonna start an ongoing series, the idea there is, in a perfect world anyway, we’re gonna start off some storytelling that will never end. We’re gonna start telling stories and then we’re never going to stop, if everything goes well. We will reach Issue #20,000 and we’ll keep going.That is very antithetical to the way Lucasfilms thinks of things, like I said, where they have a fixed timeline, and they’re like, okay, here’s the period when your story’s going to take place, and you can’t go outside of those bounds. I don’t want to make them sound like school teachers or something, like they were chastising us. It’s a different way of looking at it, because their timeline is a timeline that bounces around. This movie will take place here. And it’ll tell this story, and it’ll start there, and it’ll end there. This TV series will take place here, and it’ll do that same thing. So, when we first started pitching ongoing series, that idea, they were a little… I don’t want to say weirded out, but that wasn’t a way that they looked at things. They weren’t like, yeah, here’s a place where you can just tell stories forever. They definitely prefer that we come in and go, here’s the story that we’re looking to tell, and we’ll tell it over this many issues, even if that’s a large number of issues. They prefer that there be some sort of endpoint in place anyway.What decides if it’s an ongoing is sort of the number of issues we’re planning to tell a story about. The first Darth Vader series, I think we did 25, and I think that’s enough that it would, it’s an ongoing series. It lasts multiple years. I guess you could call it a maxi series if you really wanted to, but it’s really just an ongoing series. Star Wars is a little different because it’s a flagship book, and we’ve managed to say, we’re going to keep that going for as long as possible. With Poe, everybody involved, both Lucasfilm and Marvel, wanted to do stories that touched on the new trilogy in some capacity. Now that Last Jedi is out, I can talk a little bit more frankly about a thing that I couldn’t before. Spoiler for the very beginning of Last Jedi! The fact that Last Jedi takes place immediately after The Force Awakens, meant we couldn’t tell stories between the movies.It’s sort of fifty-fifty. Definitely, eventually, we’ll have to abandon this period. That’s a whole Lucasfilms philosophy versus Marvel philosophy, because, again, like I said before, you tell an infinite number of Spider-Man stories and you say, you know what, he still hasn’t reached his 30 birthday. He never will, probably. Except in, like, weird side stories. We can tell an infinite number of stories that all take place between 15 and 25. So, on that level, I wanna be able to say, no, we can just tell stories forever, set in that period. In real life, we can’t. We will absolutely need to stop telling stories there. Whether or not that will immediately be followed by stories between Empire and Jedi, that’s more up in the air, I think, whatever is the best thing to do. I would like to change eras, but I don’t know if that’s what we will end up doing in that moment, because, who knows, at that point it might be better to move to post-Jedi, it might be better to focus on, I mean, who knows when that’ll be, right? By then, we might need to focus on post Episode XII stuff.[Editor’s Note: this interview was edited for length.]

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN