Voice of Grievous and deleted scene make appearance at Comic-Con

Matthew Wood, Supervising Sound Editor of Episode III and voice of General Grievous, came on stage at Steve Sansweet’s Star Wars Spectacular and provided a demonstration of how he created the General’s voice, complete with sound equiptment. Fan reports have him actually have him singing a song – Hyperspace members can find out for themselves by listening to the audiocast of the event.

Steve also hinted at some of the content on the Revenge of the Sith DVD, and showed one of the deleted scenes dealing with the founding of the Rebellion. Certainly I’m not the only one hoping for an Extended Edition, ala Peter Jackson?

EU News at Comic-Con

Hyperspace members can see the cover of Dark Nest 3: The Swarm War and a sketch for the third Last of the Jedi, cover now. Both are part of the Future Star Wars Publishing slideshow, which contains sketches from Visionaries and previews of a lot of the Del Rey’s upcoming nonfiction offerings, including some fantastic artwork from the upcoming New Essential Chronology. Hyperspace members can also listen to audiocasts of the Star Wars Spectacular, Dark Horse Comics, and Publishing panels from Comic Con.

The big EU news out of Comic-Con is all about Dark Horse – ongoing series Republic and Empire are wrapping up, to be replaced by a Knights of the Old Republic (based on the game of the same name) and a “a new ongoing series of five mini-series” starting with Rebellion. There’s also a short overview of SW coffee-table and nonfiction books.

The TV show gets a brief mention, focusing on preproduction and tech stuff, during the Star Wars Spectacular.

EU tidbits in our pocketses

Next issue of Star Wars Insider will feature their Top 20 EU Moments. I expect there will be quite a bit of debate once this is released, but it’s always nice to see the books get some Insider page space.

Comic-Con 2005 is currently in progress in California, and there have been some hints that Jonathan Rinzler has an unfinished copy of The Swarm War cover. No guarantees, but attendees might get a peak. In the meantime, there’s plenty of other SW goodness going on in San Deigo.

Lucasfilm’s Sue Rostoni has started a starwars.com blog, where she has posted that Elizabeth Hand’s 2007 Old Republic novel has been canceled. No word on what will replace it, but fear not, there’s still one OR book in the queue – Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane novel. Which I suspect is the one we’re all more interested in anyway. ;)

(More EU VIP blogs can be found in starwars.com’s listing of all the latest VIP posts.)

Another interesting post found in the starwars.com blogs is Ithorian Guy on The Mystery of the Whills. He obviously knows his stuff, and the entry came to my attention via a message board post by LFL’s Leland Chee, so you know he’s gotta be onto something.

And finally, starwars.com posted the October 2005 comics yesterday – previews of Empire #38, X-wing — Rogue Leader #2, Republic #83, and Clone Wars Volume 7, which collects the Obsession arc.

It’s Absolutely Amazing

The science fiction magazine Amazing Stories initially debuted in 1926 or so and was for decades a source of science fiction and fantasy short stories. It faded away in the ’90s, but has been revived by the good folk over at Paizo Publishing.

Amazing‘s “first issue of the 21st century” (as the cover proclaims) showed up at San Diego Comic-Con a week or so ago. Now edited by Dave Gross, former editor of Star Wars Insider, it adds media coverage, including book/movie/computer game reviews, to the standard mix of short stories, columns, and letters to the editor. It also bumps the format up to 8″x11″ from the digest size that has been standard for SF&F short story publications.

The first issue features Spider-Man on the cover and fiction by Timothy Zahn, Bruce Sterling, and Gene Wolfe, among others, inside. The URL to Paizo’s Amazing Stories page is http://www.paizo.com/amazing.