Category: Star Wars

Story: As Luke struggles to recover from his momentary encounter with the mind of Darth Vader, Leia, Han, Chewie and the droids try to fight and maneuver their way off the Wheel. Their escape from the gambling station is not the end of their troubles – Han still has matters to settle with Jabba, Leia tries to expand the Rebellion to other worlds, and the cyborg bounty hunter Valance is still on Luke’s trail. Throughout the adventures, the Rebel heroes often run up against the agenda of the Tagge family, led by a ruthless baron whose desire for the Emperor’s favor, and for vengeance against Vader, drive him to enact more and more elaborate schemes to crush the Rebellion once and for all. But the Dark Lord is no stranger to scheming, and he has plans for both the Tagge family and young Skywalker.

Review: Dave: Unlike the first volume, I do have some first hand memories of the stories in this collection – at one point in my youth, I had two or three of the issues that dealt with Tagge’s storm corridor through the Yavin gas giant. I remember liking them quite a bit as a kid, and they still hold up pretty well. Now that I read them as part of the bigger tapestry of the ongoing Tagge feud, I’m even more impressed.

One thing I do wish is that that unfolding saga could have led into the events of The Empire Strikes Back a little better. Now, I don’t really know how much lead time Goodwin had to work with, or how much he knew about the overall storyline of the film when he was writing these issues. So I’m not assigning blame here – it’s just something I find a little disappointing. The characters and settings all seem frozen about five minutes after the end of the first movie – Luke’s still wearing his farm boy outfit, the Rebels are still on Yavin, and so on. Outside of a tacked on epilogue that undoes Goodwin’s earlier resolution of the Jabba bounty issue, there’s not much here bringing us to the next stage of the story. And having Luke and Vader face off face to face right before the movie adaptation is supposed to start just strikes me as a bad idea all around. … Read more

Story: The first 20 issues of Marvel’s Star Wars series are reprinted in this full color collection. From the adaptation of the film itself, which saw print before the movie’s release, to Luke’s terrifying brush against the mind of Darth Vader, the original Expanded Universe begins here. Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie and the droids encounter space pirates, frontier outlaws, floating cities of saboteurs, and a droid-hating cyborg bounty hunter named Valance while trying to help the Rebels find a new base and stay one step ahead of a Sith Lord searching for the identity of the pilot who blew up the Death Star.

Review: Dave: With the exception of the movie adaptation, I had never read any of the issues in this volume – the handful of Marvel Star Wars comics I was able to get my hands on were all from later in the run. Reading it now, there’s certainly a degree of 70s cheese, especially in the early issues written by Roy Thomas. But what a collection of talent worked on this series! Thomas, who pushed for Marvel to take up the license, is a former editor-in-chief at Marvel well known for his encyclopedic knowledge of comics’ Golden Age. When he got past the adaptation, he didn’t quite feel comfortable with the universe, and it kind of shows – his next story was more of a Magnificent Seven-esque western than a big space opera. So Archie Goodwin, then editor-in-chief and a legend in his own right, took the reins, and things started to take off. Goodwin created new villains, set subplots in motion, and brought a sense of scale and danger to the stories. And when Goodwin needed an assist, there was Chris Claremont, longtime X-Men writer.

On the artistic side, Howard Chaykin was the first penciller, and while he was still a bit rough around the edges, but you can already get a sense of the dynamism that would serve him well later in his career. (Although he was certainly greatly assisted by his inkers in those days – more on that later.) And when Chaykin left, his replacement, Carmine Infantino, was no slouch. Infantino, a former art director and publisher at DC, was well known for his Silver Age work on Batman, Flash, and a host of other heroes. While his facial renderings are sometimes a bit crude, he could definitely pack a lot of energy into his panels, and he and his inkers did fine work on all the technology of the galaxy far, far away. There’s a lot of fun stuff packed into these comics. I can only imagine what it was like to pick up each new installment in ’77 and ’78.… Read more