Blue Milk Special

Hey! Did you miss us? For the rest of April we will by publishing online every Monday and Friday, so look forward to plenty of silly Star Wars hijinks. Comments are open for a short time only, so post below.

Heir to the Empire was a 1991 Star Wars novel by Timothy Zahn, and the first book in the Thrawn trilogy.

Ever since Return of the Jedi disappeared from theaters in 1983/84, and after a second wave of interest driven by VHS sales, Star Wars had lost a lot of momentum in the public eye.

When Heir to the Empire was published, it received widespread attention in the mainstream media and reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. All of a sudden, a new wave of Star Wars merchandising, led by Bantam books, had begun.

This ushered in what was known throughout the 1990s as the EU, or Expanded Universe of adventures.

According to Zahn, Lou Aronica of Bantam Spectra had negotiated the book deal with LucasArts in 1989, and the publisher put Zahn’s name at the top of their list of possible authors. He said, “My original instructions from LucasArts consisted of exactly two rules: the books were to start 3–5 years after Return of the Jedi, and I couldn’t use anyone who’d been explicitly killed off in the movies.”

Zahn used information from the original film trilogy as his primary source, but supplemented that with details from the many sourcebooks created for West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. Saying that “the WEG sourcebooks saved me from having to reinvent the wheel many times”, Zahn noted that he used the Interdictor Cruiser from the game but invented the “lightsaber lock” concept himself.

Heir to the Empire had enormous influence in the shaping of the Star Wars Expanded Universe– the EU had previously been elaborated in RPG games, and comic strips. Soon-after, Dark Horse Comics entered the scene with the Star Wars license, and in 1995, Dark Horse started a comic adaptation of the novel. Created by Mike Baron, Olivier Vatine, and Fred Blanchard, the series lasted six issues. The series would later be republished in a graphic novel in 1997 and finally as part of the Thrawn Trilogy compilation in 2009.

For our Blue Milk Special parody, we are primarily referencing the Dark Horse Comics adaptation and the visualized characters therein, with some influence from video games, as well as our typical made-up nonsense.

When we shared a panel with Timothy Zahn at Awesome Con, several years ago, he expressed his enthusiasm at our idea to parody the Thrawn Trilogy. Though it has taken us a long time to finally get to this point, here we are at last!

After eight years of parodying the Original Trilogy and some of the Expanded Universe material that took place in-between, we are finally able to dive head first into Heir to the Empire… beginning with a slight diversion into the book Tatooine Ghost which is set just before the opening of Heir to the Empire.

***

Supporting us through Patreon is simple, and you have complete control over your subscription. You can give us as much as you like, even $1 dollar helps, and you can cancel your subscription any time. If you need to take a month off, you can simply cancel and re-subscribe when you’re ready. There are no strings attached. Patreon allows readers like yourself to support artists who are doing their part to share a laugh or two with the world, through comedy and art.

We are now hosted on WebToons (a free webcomic community) and building a new home for our community of readers. We’d love to see you over there. So drop by and experience BMS anew!

You get to experience Blue Milk Special all over again in a new vertical format that looks great on your phone, and computer. The punchline panels work so much better, and you get to see larger panels! There are even some new strips, and better chronological ordering!

There are hundreds of other classy and hilarious webcomics you can discover at WebToons, along with a vibrant community of readers to interact with. Also, by subscribing to us, and the page views, we get a small amount of financial support from WebToons that helps us when we desperately need it.

Would you like to join the BMS webcomic reader community? Well, WebToons is a fun new way of doing that. And you can join the hundreds of comments on each strip. Yep, comments are open at WebToons.

WebToons works on your web browser or your smart phone App and allows you to read a wide range of webcomics by both amateur and professional creators alike. It also has a unique formatting rule where all webcomics have to scroll vertically, rather than left to right. It makes for a brand new Blue Milk Special reading experience!

Here’s an example of our reformatted look over on the left. To read it full size, click the link to go straight to Webtoons. While you’re there, we hope you will consider making an account, checking out the many webcomics on offer, as well as becoming a subscriber to Blue Milk Special. It’s FREE!

Obviously, supporting us on Webtoons is totally free and only requires a minute of your time each day. There are many great webcomics there to discover by artists more talented than us, so dive in and escape the drudgery of daily life for a while! 🙂

On a separate note, please consider supporting BMS, whether it’s through buying one of these auctions, or donating via Patreon or GoFundMe. If you want to donate to us directly through Paypal, then here is the link.

If you subscribe to us through Patreon, you get to see the next set of strips early and get exclusive content. All money helps keep BMS going from the cost of the website to helping with my expensive monthly medical bills and health insurance. We can not publish BMS for sale as it is only a fan project, so we rely on fan support for the project’s continuation.

More BMS Milk Cartons to come on Friday! Make sure you check back!