Comic book artist Will Sliney discusses his work on the long-delayed adaptation of Marvel’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker as it finally arrives on shelves, over five years after the film debuted in 2019.
Mike Celestino, Laughing Place: I believe your first Star Wars work was for The Clone Wars comic in 2011. Is that accurate?
Will Sliney: Yeah, and not a lot of people know that. It wouldn’t have been with Marvel; it was with an English publisher that [was] doing more kid[-friendly] things– a comic that would come with a toy and have puzzles and stuff like that as well. So it might have an eight-page strip in it, and I did a couple of them back then very much in the Clone Wars style. My style was quite different back then– it was more cartoony, so it [lent itself] to it more, and it was a huge dream come true to be a little part of that world. [I was] blaring the music as loud as I could, singing the theme song: “Can’t believe this!” But it was eight pages, so it would have been over in a week or two. But it was cool, and it was just a little teaser, I guess, for what was ahead.
LP: As a Disney Parks fan I have to ask you about the work you did with Ethan Sacks for the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge miniseries and Galactic Starcruiser – Halcyon Legacy, because as the artist you were drawing these locations that were going to exist in real life before they were even accessible to anyone. So can you tell me about how you went about doing that? Were you provided with enough reference materials?
Sliney: That’s actually the thing that I always say about it: I don’t think any book artist has ever had to do that– draw a place that isn’t real, [but] that will be real, which was crazy. Of course I was given reference, but things change when you’re building things. They’re literally physically building things [at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World], so I would get regular photos of how this place was shaping up, and I often talk about the corridors of the of the Starcruiser and how they were different from what I drew, because they just naturally changed as they were building them. And I was like, “Okay, I need to go back and redraw all of the corridors that we’ve done. That was just part and parcel. I loved it; it was just this amazing experience. I wasn’t even provided with this, but there was this video online of [D23 Expo] when they revealed this scale model of Galaxy’s Edge, and people were just walking around it, and I would look at every video I could possibly find of it. Then I built my own scale model of Batuu, so I could line up every camera angle whenever we would set something in there.
So I was there [at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge] the day it opened in Florida, and the first thing I saw when I walked into a park was a kid holding up the first page, literally finding that place where it was in the park to see how well it lined up. So that must happen all the time inside there, if I walked across it and that was the first thing I saw. So you’re conscious and you want to get that right– you want them to feel like, “Whoa! This is really part of that world.” [It was] obviously difficult when it didn’t exist right, but fun.’
LP: So you’ve visited Galaxy’s Edge, but did you have the chance to board the Halcyon?
Sliney: No. I was literally just talking about that with someone today, and I’m disgusted. I remember thinking at the time, “I’m going to wait. I’m going to bring my kids.” I have young kids, so we’re making our first Florida trip next year. They’re now the right age for that. So obviously [I’m] pretty gutted that I didn’t get to do it, even just down to seeing the things we got to draw in– like where a lightsaber hits the wall when Anakin battles Ventress, and then when you go there that mark is on the wall. You really would feel like you’re a part of it. I never thought that I wouldn’t get to do it, but the legacy of it is really living on– I’m hearing stories that there’s a Halcy-Con convention.
LP: Let’s talk about The Rise of Kylo Ren, another miniseries that I was a big fan of with writer Charles Soule. This would have been your first time drawing Ben Solo, I believe. Tell me a little bit about your first time diving into that character and what the experience was like in general working on that miniseries.
Sliney: That is my favorite project I’ve been a part of, for so many reasons. It felt so crucial to the Star Wars lore– it felt like we were really telling such an important story. And then you’re given the gift of the keys to get to design so many different elements of it– obviously you can see that they’re starting to show up in very interesting different ways [including the Ren helmet and lightsaber hilt available at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge]. We were working on that story as they were making The Rise of Skywalker, and this was as closely tied into all of that as it possibly could be, and we had to do it right. We were telling such an important part of that character’s story and it felt like a privilege. It was really cool to do it.
How many people get to literally design [their] own lightsaber? That’s my lightsaber! [laughs] That is not something that happens that often. Ewan McGregor has a lightsaber, I feel like I have a lightsaber, so of course that’s amazing. It’s so strange to have that… so strange. And one of the most interesting things with it was turning it on and then realizing, “Oh, this is what it sounds like.” It has its own unique sound that was designed by the Imagineers, but I never once thought about what this thing that you’re drawing actually sounds like– just crazy– and it sounds really cool, so that’s pretty amazing.
LP: Today marks the release, finally, of your Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker adaptation. This was originally scheduled to come out in 2020, and we all know what was going on in the world in 2020. But can you tell me a little bit about what happened?
Sliney: Yeah, very simple: it just got paused and unpaused. Nothing in-between, except “Oh, I really hope this happens,” because I’ve really taken a different approach with this book than definitely any Star Wars project, or anything I’ve done before, and I can’t wait for people to see. We get to add in all this extra stuff to the lore [for one thing], but I’ve [also] tried to base all of the pages around the dyad and the reflection of the two characters, so a lot of panels are going to be laid out that way. There are certain Star Wars projects where you feel like you want to be as true and exact to what’s [on screen], whereas this one it was really about, “I’m going to really delve into a visual way of showing this reflection balance that these two characters have.
You’re going to see over the course of the five [issues] literally panel reflections and pose reflections and everything going out there in a way that you can only do in comics. There’s literally layouts of panels that you can put a mirror up to them, and they will mirror each other in that way. I was really gutted that that wasn’t going to get to come out. People are only going to start picking up on this as we go through the series and start to see all of these times when we got to do that, because obviously you can’t do it for the whole story. I think like you’ve seen I have a cover for issue two that’s out where you really can see the start of that– how everything is reflecting, so I can’t wait for people to see it.
LP: You previously adapted Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018 with writer Robbie Thompson. As an artist, can you compare and contrast the approach to adapting an existing story, as opposed to drawing a new original story for the Star Wars franchise?
Sliney: Even within that they’re all different, because I’ve done a bunch of adaptations now, I’ve even done one that hasn’t been announced yet. [Solo] was different in terms of, I didn’t have an awful lot of access to what was out there in the world. I was trying to sneak in some fun stuff of putting Alden Ehrenreich into poses that would mirror Harrison Ford’s Han Solo– just little interesting things. I actually think I had a few throughlines between that and The Rise of Kylo Ren, of having Kylo pulling off those same finger points, so you get [to] do fun things like that. It depends on the project, genuinely. God, that one feels so long ago now it’s hard to get in the headspace of what we got to do first. I’ve drawn a lot of Star Wars; I really have, and that was what I think about, because that was me moving from five years of Spider-Man over to Star Wars.
It’s now been longer– it has been six or coming up on seven years of Star Wars, and I literally started that project when I was like, “I have to have a little break, because my first son is about to be born.” I’m about to ask Marvel for that break and then Star Wars came to them going, “Hey can we steal Will over to the Star Wars universe?” I’m like, “Uh oh. I can’t ask for a break now.” So it was a wild time, and we [had] just moved into a house that we built as well, so it was this real huge change in my life– going from Spider-Man in the house that we rented with no kids to Star Wars in the house that we built with kids. I guess that’s probably why it’s hard to put my headspace into thinking about what we were doing [when] we were drawing the comic then. I need to read that book again just to take a look.
Read the interview in full at the link below.
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