Origins of Ventress

From here, a note from Dave Filoni (producer of the new Clone Wars CGI stuff) about the origins of Asajj Ventress. Given that I've already heard uninformed suggestions that she's an EU character so George is gung-ho for the EU, here's a bit of extra info to again demonstrate how uninformed such opinions are:

"Ventress was a character that was actually developed for early concept art for Attack of the Clones. There was the idea that maybe the Sith apprentice, the new one after Darth Maul, would be a girl. That got abandoned eventually in favor of Count Dooku, Christopher Lee's character. But the concept art existed. And the comic books and novels of The Clone Wars that were done, had utilized that character, that concept art and created this new character...so when it came time to develop the idea of The Clone Wars as a series, we thought, well, that's a big fan favorite character. So let's draw her out. And it just so happened that we were introducing Ahsoka at the same time, so here you have these two new girls coming into this story at the same time, which there's actually kind of an advantage to. Because you have one that's the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, trying to train in the traditional ways of a Jedi, and that's the hidden apprentice of Count Dooku, who's the evil, opposite end. So that actually works really nicely for the story that we're trying to tell."