STAR WARS: THE NEW ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CHARACTERS

By: Chris Wyatt
Date: Friday, May 10, 2002

Daniel Wallace has updated the STAR WARS: ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CHARACTERS to include characters from EPISODE I, EPISODE II and the Del Rey NEW JEDI ORDER novel series. Wallace, who has written and/or contributed to countless STAR WARS resource books, picked up the ball from Andrew Mangels, who penned the original "essential guide" in 1995.

Arranged alphabetically, each character gets its own entry in an encyclopedia-style format. The guide entries are competently written. They seamlessly incorporate facts from different sources to create an overall picture of each character. And yet, the book is far from satisfying.

Despite a photo cover, the only art offered inside the pages are lackluster color illustrations by Michael Sutfin. Sutfin?s drawings are more comic book-esque than cinematic. There are no other images of any kind included.

Often a character's entry will go longer than a page and finish on half of a next page. Sometimes when this happens, rather than fill the space with STAR WARS art, the space is just left blank. Half-empty white pages do not an interesting lay out make. The STAR WARS universe is so visually compelling, there really is no reason to make a STAR WARS reference book that looks so bland.

The book includes entries on characters from all STAR WARS media; that is to say, from the movies, the books, the comics, the cartoons, etc. It's a wise move to include all of these characters, but absolutely no effort is made to indicate the character's source. When encountering an entry on an unfamiliar character, the reader has no way of knowing whether said character is from a novel or a comic, or perhaps was just a small character in the background of one of the films.

Also, in the entries of the characters with whom we are familiar, no effort is made to designate the source of different events cited in the passage. For example, the "Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader" entry begins with events that are clearly from EPISODE I and EPISODE II but then quickly moves to include write ups on events that didn't happen in any movie. Where's the source for these events? What if I'd like to know more? How do I know which novel to read? Did Wallace manufacture some of the facts by himself? It is frustratingly impossible to say.

The idea of making a character guide is a good one. And even the very entries that Wallace wrote are fine-- but without well-kept sources the book isn't very useful at all.

Fans should probably steer clear of this largely non-referenced, reference book. The discriminating collector might find a much more interesting buy in Mark Cotta Vaz's THE ART OF STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Vaz's book does not address character back-stories, but it is a much better presented and more interesting reference volume.