Last week's news that the Star Wars comics franchise will shift from Dark Horse to Marvel in 2015 hit quite a few people pretty hard, including, seemingly, Dark Horse Vice President of Publishing Randy Stradley, who has been senior editor of the publisher's Star Wars comics since 2002.

"Going to the store for wine. I hope they have enough," he tweeted. But in a message posted to Facebook Sunday, Stradley told followers that there are plenty of reasons for Star Wars fans to be happy, and that he's probably okay with being out of the game.

After thanking supporters, Stradley gave his reasons:

But [if] Dark Horse must lose the license, this is probably a good time for it. From my perspective, the upcoming films will mean less freedom to do what we at Dark Horse have always done best: expanding the universe. With a new film scheduled every year, and a new television series, it is likely that there will be a lot of comics pages devoted to adaptations and direct spin-off stories in support of the films and TV shows. That's not where my interests lie, and it has never been Dark Horse's strong suit. That would be too much like real work to me.

 

Probably, the coming years will be a great time to be a Star Wars fan (especially a *new* Star Wars fan), and I hope you all enjoy the ride, but I think I'm going to be glad to not be in the mix.

He also added this in a comment:

There is no way for me to know what plans Marvel has, or whether they will continue telling stories with characters we created. As I said in my post, my suspicion is the focus of the license will be to support the new films rather than exploring our loose ends.

So there you have it. The man who thought up the idea to kill Chewbacca in a comic (at least according to Wookieepedia) isn't all that interested in Disney bigwigs telling him he can't do stuff like kill Chewbacca. Some fans will probably be happy about that; others are probably still going to be upset. Either way, 2014 and 2015 are guaranteed to be years with lots of Star Wars.

[Via Robot6]

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