Ki-Adi-Mundi is a Cerean Jedi Master from the Mid Rim world of Cerea and a member of the Jedi High Council through the whole of the prequel period. He is unusual among the Council aliens in that he did not start on film: he was created for Dark Horse's Star Wars ongoing, débuting in issue #1, the opening chapter of the arc Prelude to Rebellion, published on 16 December 1998 — five months before The Phantom Menace reached cinemas.
A comic character promoted to the Council
That publication order is the interesting fact about him. Dark Horse's late-1990s Republic-era line was building out the Order in print while Lucasfilm was building it on screen, and Ki-Adi-Mundi is the clearest case of traffic running the other way: designed for the page by Jan Strnad and Anthony Winn, then seated in the Council chamber in all three films, where Silas Carson plays him under a very tall prosthetic skull.
Cerea, and why it matters
Prelude to Rebellion is about his homeworld rather than about him. Cerea is deliberately low-technology, the Republic wants it integrated, and the planet's young people want speeder bikes. It is a small, unglamorous story about what galactic membership costs a place that was doing fine — and it is one of the few pieces of prequel-era fiction that treats the Republic as something other than obviously benign.
The line everybody remembers
On screen he gets one genuinely load-bearing moment: the Council's reaction to Qui-Gon Jinn's report of a Sith attacker on Tatooine. His flat refusal of the possibility is the prequels stating their own thesis out loud — the Jedi cannot see the Sith because they have decided the Sith are a historical subject.
Legends and canon
His Legends biography (a family on Cerea, a rare dispensation from the Order's rules on attachment because of Cerean birth rates) belongs to the Expanded Universe and is not part of current canon. What both continuities keep is simpler: a senior, sober, slightly literal-minded Master who commands in the Clone Wars and is shot in the back by his own troops on Mygeeto when Order 66 comes through.
Where to find him
The Dark Horse Republic run is the only place he is a lead. In the films he is furniture with a good line; in The Clone Wars he is a general with a habit of being wrong about Grievous. The one book on this shelf that gives the Council chamber real weight around him is The Living Force.
