“One does not choose Star Wars,” John Jackson Miller said. “Star Wars chooses you.”

Miller, an American science-fiction author, comic book writer and UT graduate, will return to the university and Knoxville area today, 25 years after he left, to discuss his upcoming Star Wars novel, “A New Dawn,” and his career as a pop culture writer. During his time at UT working as a Daily Beacon reporter and editor, Miller said he would have never guessed he would turn out as a comic book writer and novelist.

“I didn’t really know where I would wind up, but I was doing so many important and interesting things,” he said, recalling his first few experiences with journalism, like interviewing then-Gov. Lamar Alexander when Miller was just a beginning writer hanging out in the Daily Beacon’s office.

“I just grabbed my pad and ran upstairs,” Miller said. “That was kind of throwing me into the deep end, but I couldn’t stop after that. I took all the complicated political stories, and they resulted in some great experiences.”

In 1989, Miller interviewed Joe Biden, just a senator from Delaware at the time. Biden had just run an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1988 and was coming to UT as a guest lecturer. Miller said the Daily Beacon was the only media outlet in Knoxville interested in speaking with Biden.

“I was the only person in the room with the guy who would go on to become the vice president, and I interviewed him for 30 minutes for the Beacon,” Miller said. “He was really great and interesting and willing to talk to a student journalist … I’ve never forgotten that.”

Eric Smith, assistant director of student publications, was working as the adviser at the time Miller was writing for the Daily Beacon. Smith noted that Miller was an excellent reporter and treated comic books like factual history.

“He always looked like he was about 12 years old,” Smith joked. “He was just one of those guys who was perpetually young.”After graduating from UT in 1989, Miller used his reporting experience to start a career in journalism.

He wrote for trade magazines for a period before getting his “big break” when he was hired as an editor in the comic book industry. In 2003, Miller got his first comic book assignment with Marvel Comics and began writing for the Iron Man series. Soon, he became connected with Dark Horse Comics, the company that produces the Star Wars comics. 

“A lot of this stuff is all invitation only,” he said. “So, a lot of people want to write this stuff but they have to be able to find out how to get plugged in.” 

Miller commented on how writing comics about the Star Wars series was just an extension and professional application of his own personal interests.

“I saw Star Wars the year that it came out. I was 9 years old and I had been a reader of the Star Wars comics from the very, very beginning,” he said. “I finally got to work in the same world that I had been reading comics and novels in for so many years.”

Miller said that during his time spent at the Beacon, he wrote many movie reviews and recalled spending the summer of 1989 in Knoxville seeing the Batman movie 12 times. 

“There just wasn’t a lot to do then,” he said, laughing. 

Two years ago, Miller began writing prose fiction and published his first hardcover novel “Star Wars Kenobi” just last year, winning the Scribe Award for Best Tie-In Novel of 2013. 

Miller said he couldn’t decide which he preferred writing, comics or novels, stating that the process is vastly different for each. 

“When you’re writing a novel, you have to tell a reader everything that’s going on, you have to describe everything, you have to tell what the characters’ outfits and costumes look like, you have to describe all the settings,” Miller said. “But, I have the opportunity to get into the mind of my characters and to really tell stories that might be more complicated than I could do in a comics format, talking about the philosophy and the politics in the world that surrounds the characters.”

Miller said his new novel, “A New Dawn,” does exactly that, building on the fictional tale that started with the “Star Wars Rebels” TV series moving toward the seventh episode of the Star Wars movie series, “The Force Awakens,” dated for release in December 2015.

In addition to writing these novels and keeping up with his comic book work, Miller also runs the leading data website for comic book sales figures, comichron.com. His website compiles data from as far back as the ’30s and tracks the sales of comics in the country.

“The comic book industry has gone through many changes over the years and maybe transformations,” Miller said. “We like to joke that the comic book industry has nearly died three times, but it has always come back from the dead.”

Miller noted that in the last two years, the creation of the graphic novel saved the industry again, widening the demographic of comic book readers and making them marketable at almost any bookselling location.

In the month of October, data on Miller’s website showed comic book stores in America made $56 million, the largest, one-month sales figure in about 20 years. 

“It’s a big deal,” Miller said. “It’s been a very good year.”

On Wednesday, Miller will be promoting his new novel and discussing his career as a comic writer and novelist at a book signing at Barnes and Noble at 7 p.m. Miller will also be visiting his old stomping grounds: The Daily Beacon.