Via the Star Wars Galactic Hunter Figure of the Day Blog: Mara Jade (The Black Series). It's a good figure despite being parts from Aphra/Jaina with a new head and new paint - it's just not as "accurate" as it could be. Then again, for a comic/novel character, there's more than a little wiggle-room and at a glance, she's kind of fantastic. Read on!
While the Expanded Universe - not even called such until 1998 - has long been a way to get fans to buy paper much like Hasbro has found a way to get us to buy plastic, it hasn't been all that unusual for a bit of slate-cleaning now and again. Today, StarWars.com confirms it's basically wiping the slate as clean as can be.
For those who follow such things, the great Leland Chee has given us insight regarding Lucasfilm's Expanded Universe archive's levels of official-ness over the years. But now The Hollywood Reporter is telling us that Disney is going to change it up a bit, making one official level of canon and another that, for all intents and purposes, you can ignore. Or enjoy. It's up to you. Click here to read it. It doesn't tell us everything.
If you were a fan of Star Wars in the 1990s, you no doubt remember seeing some of A.C. Crispin's work on the shelves. The author, Ann Crispin, penned short stories for the franchise, a trilogy of Han Solo novels, and numerous works of licensed and sci-fi writing including Star Trek. Click here for her official site, and here for her Wikipedia page.
If you kitbashed Star Trek and Lord of The Rings, you'd probably come close to a Nom Anor. He's muscularly stunning and quite foreboding. As the new Masters of the Universe...whoops, did I just write that?... in the New Jedi Order timeline, the Yuuzhan Vong are quite the compelling and complicated conquering race, and they obviously like to workout.
Nom Anor was a Fan's Choice candidate a few times, and Hasbro finally decided to release him favorite or not.
The first figure in an Expanded Universe Vintage card is quite possibly the best of 2011. Hasbro does pretty much everything you could possibly want for ARC-77, based on the more popular episodes of the Tartakovsky micro-series. He's got interchangeable Phase I and II armor, a unique headsculpt (with a faux hawk and soul patch nonetheless!), and even comes with an instruction insert to show you how to attach both holsters.