Star Warp

A few weeks ago I bought the complete set of Marvel Star Wars Omnibuses (Omnibi?). The comic ran for 107 issues, from 1977 to 1986. These three volumes collect the entire run.

I remember seeing the Star Wars comic in stores back in the day. As a fan of the movies I was intrigued by it, but I never bought any issues because I considered myself "too old" for comics back then. Haw! How the turn tables!

Anyway, I've been reading the first volume for a couple weeks now. I honestly wasn't expecting much from it, but the stories are surprisingly good! Some of the multi-part ones would have actually made decent movies. Who knew?

That said, the series isn't perfect. The Volume One omnibus features stories that were originally published from 1977 to 1980. It begins with an adaptation of A New Hope (which was just called Star Wars back then) and ends with The Empire Strikes Back. 

That means there were three whole years worth of stories in which the writers had no knowledge of what was going to happen or where the series was headed. This created more than a few continuity errors.

For example, in Issue #28 Han Solo has an encounter with Jabba The Hutt. This particular story was published in 1979, a full four whole years before Jabba made his onscreen debut in The Return Of The Jedi (And eighteen years before he was retconned into A New Hope in the Special Editions in 1997).

Since the artist had no idea that Jabba would eventually appear in one of the movies, he felt free to create his own version. This is what he came up with. Whoops!

I love how hilariously wrong they got it.

I wonder how the comic handled Jabba once Jedi came out? Did they just pretend like this version of him never happened? Or maybe they said this was one of Jabba's agents. Or someone pretending to be him?

There's another major continuity error in Star Wars Annual #1. In that issue, Luke lands on a planet and is captured by aliens. They're about to kill him, but when they find out his last name they let him go. When he asks what's going on, they tell him that years ago three Jedi saved their planet from the Empire. Luke asks who the Jedi were. The aliens reply there was an older one named Obi-Wan, and two younger pupils named Vader and Skywalker.

This issue was published in 1979 (a full year before The Empire Strikes Back premiered), so the writers had no idea about the whole "Vader Is Luke's Father" thing. They were still going by Obi Wan's lie that Vader and Luke's dad were two separate people. Again, Whoops! Now THAT'S gonna require some explanation down the line!

The artwork in the Star Wars comic is pretty good for the most part, with one notable exception— Chewbacca. For no good reason, he looked more like Bigfoot than he did a Wookiee for the first three years of the comic.

I'm honestly baffled by this. Take a look at the rest of the characters in the comic. They managed to capture them all reasonably well. R2 and 3PO in particular look really good, as the artists managed to get all their fiddly little details just right.

So what the hell went wrong with Chewie? Even without the internet, there was still plenty of Star Wars photo-reference floating around back then. The characters appeared in hundreds of books, games and magazines, as well as toys. There was no excuse for not knowing what Chewie was supposed to look like.

They finally started drawing him right in The Empire Strikes Back adaptation, after three full years of Bigfoot Chewie.

The Star Wars comic turned out to be a big hit for Marvel. Oddly enough, Stan Lee was initially opposed to publishing it, as movie adaptations rarely sold well. He was finally convinced to give it a shot, and made a deal with Lucasfilm. Marvel would keep 100% of the profits from the first 100,000 copies of each issue. Lucasfilm would then receive a percentage of any sales over that figure.

It was a shrewd deal, as the massive popularity of Star Wars carried over to the comic. According to Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter, Star Wars ended up saving Marvel, which was undergoing financial difficulties in the late 1970s.

On a related note, Marvel was near bankruptcy in the 1990s too, and survived only by selling off the film rights to their most popular characters to various movie studios. 

Jesus Christ, have they ever been a successful company? Or have they always been on the verge of closure?