• he/him

cohost's first star wars fanblog, official "Big Name Fan".

 

in my "bad batch s3" era currently



starwars-characters
@starwars-characters

Ulic Qel-Droma was a male Jedi Knight whose life was recounted in the quasi-historical Qel-Droma Epics. According to the myths, after Qel-Droma's Master was killed by the Krath, Qel-Droma volunteered to infiltrate and destroy the Krath.


CT-0451
@CT-0451

so you know how recently disney released Tales of the Jedi the animated series? well in the 90s there was a COMIC called Tales of the Jedi that was about the ancient history of the Jedi and the Sith and the badass wars that they fought in the hella far back past. It was co-written by Tom Veitch and Kevin J Anderson (both of whom did quite a few of the Star Wars comics in that 90s period when Star Wars was almost primarily a comics franchise).

Along with Ulic, one of the characters introduced in that series was the future sith lord Exar Kun, a guy who had a double-bladed BLUE lightsaber and was so cool he also made the jump to new canon

Exar Kun wielding his trademark double-bladed blue lightsaber

anyway ONE of those Tales of the Jedi was the tale of ULIC QEL-DROMA and the BEAST RIDERS OF ONDERON

which was this wild, Heavy Metal style story about guys on ancient Onderon riding giant pterodactyl things and doing sick kills on each other in a series of conflicts known as the BEAST WARS in order to figure out who next would rule the planet. It was fucking wild

A comic panel from Tales of the Jedi, featuring the distinctive BEAST LORDS walking in a column toward a capitol city

anyway these comics are extremely goofy but seemed to be extremely influential?? The KOTOR games included "Qel-Droma armor", Exar Kun showed up in a MASSIVE swath of Legends material (including in TOR, and in the New Jedi Order books as a holocron ghost who fucked up a bunch of luke's jedi school kids).

Onderon's appearance in the TotJ comics was also crucial to the Clone Wars series, since it shows up in an early season pretty much pulled directly from the comic -complete with the capitol city Iziz, the distinctive architecture introduced in the comic, a hereditary monarchy, and... of course... the Beast Riders of Onderon.

A Beast Rider of Onderon from the Clone Wars tv show

The design was different but the gist was basically the same as the Beast Riders introduced in TotJ (which, to be clear, made some sense even in the old Legends canon - TotJ was set like 5000 years prior to the events of the Clone Wars).

And, of course, since it's Onderon -- yes, that is a young Saw Gerrera riding that titular Beast. We would not have Saw Gerrera if it wasn't for this weird-ass 90s comic!! Saw's backstory is partially based around the fact that he is an Onderonian partisan who rides beasts and is a loyal defender of the planet's monarchy. The dominos fell and now he's in the fuckin movies!!

Saw Gerrera in TCW and Saw Gerrera in Rogue One. Wow!

Anyway, I don't think it is an amazing comic exactly, it's deeply weird and feels very 'un-Star Wars' in the way that a lot of the 90s output did. There was a lot of Violence and Big Guns and everyone looked like Cable from the X-Men, but it was also... the first Legends media that I remember ever reading as a kid! My elementary school library had a copy of these comics (not age appropriate at all) and I must have read them like twenty times. I thought it was so weird and fantastical. It was such a wildly different take on Star Wars, it didn't even feel like the same universe. Very experimental, in retrospect.

So that's why I think a lot about Ulic Qel-Droma. Bizarrely load-bearing part of the Star Wars franchise at this point.


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in reply to @CT-0451's post:

Exquisite post, CT. Nothing is quite like Star Wars in pulling incredibly stupid stuff it has somehow already deemed noncanonical and then making it more important than when it was text.