Perhaps the genre that Star Wars has had the most success with outside of the obvious genres is comedy. From the beginning, Mad, Cracked, and Crazy capitalized on the success of Star Wars by poking fun at it. Continuing in that tradition, both Robot Chicken and The Family Guy have made Star Wars jokes a staple for their television audiences. Star Wars Tales, Dark Horse's anthology title, has several issues devoted to humorous Star Wars stories. Additionally, Dark Horse published spoofs of Star Wars that starred Tag and Bink, two bumbling characters whose tale intertwine with the movie stories.
The next genre that comes to mind is horror. There is a Goosebumps inspired series titled Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear aimed at younger readers. For older readers, there is the Death Troopers book from Del Rey. Dark Horse also used one of horror's sub-genres, zombies, in their crossover event Vector which spans various titles they published in 2008.
Romance is represented in Bantam's The Courtship of Princess Leia. Dark Horse has both Star Wars: Union and Star Wars: A Valentine Story which are romance. Crime is front in center in stories that revolve around the seedy underground like Scoundrels from Del Rey and the Jabba one-shots from Dark Horse. Spy fiction, a sub-genre of action, is apparent in Dark Horse's Agent of the Empire mini-series.
While steampunk, a sub-genre of science fiction, has not been tackled directly in a Star Wars story, it is used in Fred Perry's Steam Wars published by Antarctic Press. Steam Wars is a homage to Star Wars and while the story is not the Star Wars story retold in a world ruled by steam technology, the look of the characters borrow heavily from Star Wars. The first 5-issue series has characters whose designs are clearly based on Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2. Not be be left out, the villain looks strikingly similar to Darth Vader.
No comments:
Post a Comment