Page 29 - Star Wars Insider #182

INTERVIEW: ADAM REX

tar Wars Insider: order) a dishwasher, grocery bagger,
Where did your sales clerk, pizza chef, busboy,
S Star Wars journey handyman, movie-theater usher,
bookseller, cartoonist, and waiter at
begin, and was it
a big infl uence an Italian restaurant who regularly
on your chosen served Joseph “Joe Bananas”
career as a writer and illustrator? Bonanno, former head of the
Adam Rex: It began at the Bonanno crime family.
beginning—I was four years old in
1977, and the fi rst Star Wars fi lm was What were the origins of Are You

the fi rst film I remember seeing in a Scared, Darth Vader?
theater. So it’s hard to overestimate Michael Siglain, Creative Director at

its influence on me—Star Wars was Lucasfilm publishing is a fan of a
my first mythology. Specifi cally, couple of picture books I published

I thought a lot about the original years ago about monsters and their 01
trilogy when I was writing a novel everyday monster problems. The

trilogy of my own (The Cold Cereal first was called Frankenstein Makes a a character. For that same reason
Saga). I feel like Star Wars: The Sandwich. So, he got in touch to see I made all the monsters in the
Empire Strikes Back has become if I might have any ideas for a book pretty standard Halloween
everyone’s touchstone for how to do Halloween-themed Star Wars book. characters, because I thought it
a middle installment right. Over time we moved away from it would be useful for the reader to
being explicitly a holiday book—the know more about them than
The Dirty Cowboy, by Amy original draft was pretty different. Vader does.
Timberlake, was your fi rst picture Of course, you don’t own this
book, but what were you up to What is the process of putting character, and there are people
prior to that big break? together a picture book like whose job it is to tell you what you
Trying to write picture books, this, especially in relation 01 Adam Rex, can and can’t do to him. There was
author and
sending my portfolio out to to Star Wars, where you’re illustrator some slapstick and sight gags in
publishers, getting rejected a lot, working within an existing of Are You early drafts that I had to remove
Scared, Darth
and paying all of my bills through fi ctional universe? because they were too undignifi ed.
Vader?
illustrating Dungeons & Dragons It’s such a pleasure to be able Lucasfilm was letting me play with

books and Magic: The Gathering to jump head first into this 02 Rex’s take on their action figure but they wanted

vampires,
cards. Before becoming a paid book without really having it back in more or less the same
witches, and
illustrator I was (in no particular to establish who Vader is as wolfmen. condition it was in when I got it.
Did you have any favorite Star
02
Wars children’s books growing
up? What was it about them that
make them stick in your mind?
Let’s see: I had a picture book
called The Mystery of the Rebellious
Robot. That one’s great for the weird
late-70s illustration and the fact
that Chewbacca’s the only one to
get a medal at the end of it. But the
one that really sticks in my mind
was a pop-up book that the internet
tells me was published in 1978.
So, I would have been fi ve. I’ve
been looking at online images of
the book’s spreads and I could just
about pass out from nostalgia—in
particular, I remember the spread
wherein you could swing Luke and
Leia across one of those inexplicable
Death Star chasms.
In that same year, an Alan Dean
Foster novel called Splinter of
the Mind’s Eye was published,

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