Celebration VI: A new Essential Guide to Characters is coming

Announced less than an hour ago here in Orlando was a new Essential Guide to Characters for next year by Daniel Wallace. Now, that wasn’t exactly a secret: We reported on it way back in April 2011. So what was the news? That Doug Wheatley will be doing all the portraits for it, 150 in all. Look for it next July.

There was other news, of course: Check it out beneath the cut.

• The Essential Readers’s Companion will be one of the first EGs to be released in eBook formats. It will be joined by the Essential Guide to Warfare on October 2.
• Jason Fry talked a bit about Warfare, thanking several fans in the audience who had helped and calling writing it “the greatest job in the world.”
• Pablo revealed that they found references to female stormtroopers, ala the art in Warfare, in George Lucas’ notes.
• The Essential Readers’s Companion is 496 pages and covers 410 works. It contains only a few references to comics, things that are explicitly connected to novels – I assume that means things like Dark Empire and Knight Errant.
• ERC does contain some young reader books – Pablo mentioned Jude Watson. They did draw the line at the stuff for really little kids, though. And yes, the Jedi Prince series is in there, as a sidebar. And a reference to ‘mofferences,’ of course.
• And finally, for something close to our own hearts, artist Darren Tan is fixing the lightsaber in the Mara Jade art that Erich Schoeneweiss let us debut. In the final version, it will be the ‘legacy’ saber used by Luke and Anakin.

We saw a LOT of art from the Readers’s Companion, and I’ll have some pictures later – you can see a few on Twitter. Big thanks to the panel, and trust me – you’ll want that book!