Star Wars: “Incognito”

“Who I am is no longer important.” — The Young Father (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

The short story prequel to Kenobi finds Obi-Wan fleeing to Tatooine with the young Luke Skywalker — and meeting someone special along the way…

First published by Titan • July 23, 2013

Written by John Jackson Miller

Art by Chris Scalf

Edited by Shelly Shapiro and Jonathan Wilkins

I had wanted to get a short story into Star Wars: Insider for a long time, starting back with my first short story for StarWars.com, but the publication wasn’t much in the short fiction business during that time. By 2013 this had changed, with Del Rey acting to help produce the stories.

My initial notion for the story, an action scene in Mos Eisley or Anchorhead, I wound up using as the added prologue for the novel itself. But the backup idea — showing Obi-Wan traveling with the baby to Tatooine — was strong on its own. The story would follow a senator, one of the objectors to Palpatine, fleeing; Obi-Wan would encounter the senator and act to save him from Palpatine’s minions.

I selected the Kedorzhans, a species I created in Knights of the Old Republic #2, for the group to be represented by the senator; the Kedorzhans were not of Taris, so what happened to that planet wasn’t a problem. I also decided that the story would be representative of the novel in that we would only see Obi-Wan through another’s eyes; the Jedi’s name does not appear in the story. I wrote it in early April between episodes of Overdraft: The Orion Offensive.

There were some fun moments: Obi-Wan not knowing really how to take care of Luke, and Dewell Bronk offering assistance. It’s also possibly the first use of a spray can in combat by a Jedi.

It appeared in Star Wars Insider #143, the August/September issue, with great art from Chris Scalf, who had drawn the promotional image for Kenobi that accompanied the book’s announcement. In 2014, the story would appear as a backup feature in the Kenobi paperback.

“Even the smallest among us could change the galaxy.” — The Young Father (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

There’s an error in the magazine version: We had changed the name of the ship from the Tallaan Clipper to the Space Slug somewhere along the way, and missed one of the occurrences. In the paperback, we simply took Tallaan Clipper out of italics to make it the ship class.

Landing Pad 560 is another of the inclusions of the number of my grandfather’s LST from World War II.