All of these stories have the potential of traversing platform, traversing medium. JW: Well, there's nothing immediately coming out at the moment, but all of these stories are super expandable. We got a couple of spinoffs from Volume 1, mostly focusing on 'The Ronin.' Do you foresee future projects like that? Is there any particular episode in this volume that you think could lend itself to expansion the way 'The Ronin' did?

You also mentioned the publishing aspects. So yeah, I think it was an experiment, but it was also part of the power of it as well, that you can really lean into the form.

I think one of the great powers of Star Wars is it's this franchise that all these things connect in so many powerful ways and you can enter it from all different places, and there is this timeline that is this ongoing history, but what you couldn't get with that are unexpected choices like 'The Duel,' things that were stylistically really a celebration about the medium and the influences of Star Wars, the influences of Akira Kurosawa and George Lucas, and that was really a celebration of the medium and cinema in general, or 'T0-B1' is a love letter, really, to early manga and Astro Boy. JW: I think all of that, right? I think it was an experiment. Was the fact that it is outside of continuity seen as a challenge or a potentially hard sell with audiences? Or was it seen as a strength, something that would allow you to do things that maybe you couldn't do otherwise? Part of what makes this series unique is that it is not part of the wider expanding Star Wars universe, which is pretty much all of Star Wars at this point. We love anime and I think we definitely want to go back to anime at some point with Star Wars, but we felt there was so much more, so many other cultural perspectives that we showcased through this platform. What else could we see found through different countries, through different cultures?Īnd we're such big animation fans that there were so many studios globally, so many new styles, so many unique methodologies that are happening now that we thought that this would be a great opportunity to switch it up and showcase all of that and go on that kind of global tour. It lingered, and we suddenly started wondering what that could look like through all different other cultural lenses.

And so ultimately with Volume 2, one of the things we noticed with Volume 1 was that not only was it amazing because it was really just good anime storytelling, anime spectacle, and anime Star Wars, but there were choices that were made throughout that could only come from creators that were from Japan, that had specific Japanese reference points historically, culturally, religiously, and just cinematic style, and that stayed with us.

The black witch book 3