Mara Jade & Luke Skywalker by Colin Wilson. “Star Wars: Invasion: Refugees” Issue #4. October, 2009.

Preliminary Sketches and Line Art by Colin Wilson. “Star Wars: Invasion: Refugees” Issue #4. October, 2009.

“Twenty-five years after the events in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, the relentless assault by the alien invaders known as the Yuuzhan Vong has plunged the galaxy into war.”

The fourth issue in the “Star Wars: Invasion” comic series featured the only comic book appearance of Mara Jade set during the New Jedi Order era. The underrated series was written by Tom Taylor, penciled and inked by Colin Wilson, colored by Wes Dzioba, and lettered by Michael Heisler. Wilson had these memories to share of Mara’s appearance on page 5 of Issue #4:

As is usual for a lot of my pages from that period, the original art differs somewhat from the final published page. There are no panel borders, and as the lettering was added later in the USA, there is no text on the artwork. I obviously did a lot of work on the final panel on this page, and the final inked elements were later added via Photoshop. This is something that was often done at that time, and still happens occasionally on my pages if I need to change something that is already inked on the page. Obviously I (or maybe Tom) wasn’t entirely convinced by my initial drawing of Mara Jade in Panel 5, so I penciled in a variation on the side of the page, and then redrew the panel entirely. Because I use a lightbox for my artwork, I draw a lot of preliminary sketches so that I can make changes and position any image on the final pages before I ink them. Not all of them, only the drawings that are ’successful’ or otherwise of some interest. I couldn’t find any penciled version of the Millennium Falcon in the first panel on this page, so it probably means that I drew it directly on the page and then simply inked over it. Back when I was working on Star Wars my thumbnails were very sketchy and rough and I never bothered to keep them.