October - Theme - Comic

[colls]

This month was a themed month. The idea is to read any Star Wars book you'd like that can be applied to the theme.

1. How was the ending?

2. Were there any scenes that struck you as memorable?

3. Would you recommend it to other readers?

Next Month: The Fallen Star (High Republic) by Claudia Gray

Comments

[brokenmnemonic]

I read some early Marvel Star Wars comics. Not as many as I'd like, as October was a really busy month, but the equivalent of about 3 regular graphic novels' worth. These were the comics that started coming out after Star Wars first aired, and are the ones that were reprinted over here by Marvel Comics UK, which is where I first started reading them, although I'd never read the earliest issues. Some of the art - particularly the space and spaceships art - was very much what I remember from my childhood, though.

The comics that came between Star Wars airing and the release of Empire Strikes Back were pretty wild. Definitely imaginative, but also very much in line with other comics of the era. For example, there's an ark involving our heroes fighting a space pirate band operating a captured Star Destroyer and led by a man named Crimson Jack, which includes a fight between Jack and Luke in space. As in, they're fighting without space suits inside some kind of energy beam between two ships, and Jack is wearing his space pirate outfit, which looks very much like a combination of a BDSM harness and a WWE wrestling outfit.

One of the things that I very much enjoyed was the idea of competing factions within the Empire; the antagonists for an extended story arc included the nobles of the Tagge family, headed up by Baron Tagge. They hated Vader, because of the death of the previous Baron Tagge, and the current Baron Tagge has cybernetic eyes because Vader blinded him with his lightsabre - and has spent the time since training with a lightsabre, waiting for the opportunity to try and kill Vader with it. Instead, he ends up fighting Luke, who has to learn pretty quickly as a result. Then there's mad scientist Tagge, the younger brother, and their baby sister, who both brothers are convinced are innocent but who instead ends up getting her galactic church group to hold an in-person negotiation between representatives of the Empire (Vader) and the Rebellion (Luke) on one of their shrine worlds to see which group their religion will support. Only she's being manipulated by Vader, who's convinced her that her brothers were killed by the rebellion, but he actually has them in cryo-stasis (and one of them breaks free, for added hijinks!). Plus, she's actually also plotting against Vader, and has arranged the duel to kill both Vader and Luke.

And that's a short summary of the shenanigans in those 12 issues, and I've not mentioned the waterworld bandits or the sea dragon riders...

The last six issues I read were the adaptation of ESB, which had to be completed before the movie came out. That was fascinating in some ways, as the writing team included copious notes on how they'd worked. If you can find them, the original comics have a Yoda in them who looks very different, because he was based on the studio notes and mock-ups, and his appearance changed during filming. The graphic novel that was released, and the online comics, have a corrected version of Yoda in them, but it was fun to learn about what'd happened. The studio asked for the comics to deliberately leave a few details out, the most prominant one was asking them not to show the giant space slug in the asteroid, but the comics include things that were in an earlier version of the script that never made it into the movie, like wampas breaking into the rebel complex and the rebels having to work out how to detect them and then trap them in certain areas. And, of course, they don't have Harrison Ford's most famous ad-lib in the adaptation...

One of the really striking things was the change in artists between the earlier comics and the ESB adaptation; the original artist was great at landscape and ships, but the character art was a bit off for me; the characters looked very angular and somewhat styilised, although I think it was good art for the time. The artist for ESB produced character art that made the main characters much more recogniseable, and is what I remember from the comics I read as a kid.

[colls]

Ah.... I think I remember some of those early comics. How fun to go back in time like that!


I read Star Wars: Kanan, Vol. 1: The Last Padawan and am going to try to read Vol. 2 this week. I liked it! The progression in the art from the kid in the brown robe to the smuggler with the pony-tail worked nicely. I liked his friend, Janus Kasmir.