STAR WARS: EPISODE 9: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

Because Star Wars is a money making franchise which has to continually be kept running, Disney has been busy training everyone to understand that Episode 9, rather than being the end of Star Wars, is more accurately the end of “the Skywalker Saga” - a subset of Star Wars which sits alongside all the other shows like The Madalorian and spin-off movies like Rogue One. However I understand it in the context presented to me in 1979 - it's the final episode of the 9 movie Star Wars saga.

Here's an excerpt from the very enjoyable book "Once Upon a Galaxy" by Alan A.Arnold:

"Alan A. Arnold: Tell me more about the overall concept of the Star Wars saga.
George Lucas: There are essentially nine films in a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy is about the young Ben Kenobi and the early life of Luke's father when Luke was a little boy. This trilogy takes place some twenty years before the second trilogy which includes Star Wars and Empire. About a year or two passes between each story of the trilogy and about twenty years pass between the trilogies. The entire saga spans about fifty five years."

The Star Wars adaptation comics have been a mixed bag. The first three have sterling work from Roy Thomas / Howard Chaykin, and Archie Goodwin / Al Williamson. By the time we got to the comic of The Last Jedi last year, I found I enjoyed that more than the movie. I was able to swallow the events of that story more when presented as a comic (which I could pretend was an expanded universe type of thing).

As far as I’m aware a comic for The Rise of Skywalker hasn’t been announced, but with this last trilogy, the adaptations have been coming out a year after the movies, so we’ll see.


In any case, tomorrow sees the culmination of the promised 9 part saga. Obviously a lot of things have changed along the way (Lucas’ non-involvement is a deal-breaker, truth be told). But it is what it is, and it feels like a momentous occasion to me.

Goodbye, Star Wars p2 from Break the Cake, 2018.

I STAND WITH THE HOOJIBS

I recently completed my weekly blog project, "I Stand with the Hoojibs", which collects individual panels from the Star Wars comics published by Marvel between 1977 and 1986. 

The creative teams and years are tagged, and so these serve as an index.

It was a fun undertaking. I have another series in mind to do the same thing with later.

THE BEANS PODCAST

I'm the guest on the latest episode of The Beans Podcast.
Have a listen here.

Information from the website:
"Once a month we bring a guest into the studio hear stories from them about their work! This month it is maker of comics; DAVID ROBERTSON!
Here are a couple of links where you can explore his work:
www.fredeggcomics.com/
twitter.com/FredEggComics
If you want more info & links on this story, go to thebeanspodcast.com and look it up on our blog! You can also find us on Twitter: @thebeanspod and email us stories you’d like to see covered at thebeanspod@gmail.com
Our show is hosted by Valerie Mullen (@v_glenmullen), Sam Gonçalves (@SidlingBears) and Erin Farley (@aliasmacalias).
Music for this episode was created by Alex Auldsmith, whose work you can find on alexauldsmith.bandcamp.com/ and themicroband.bandcamp.com/"

MY FAVOURITE COMICS PAGE

Not really. But that was the open call that went out as part of the “Comics, So What?” event that took place recently, arranged by Chris Murray and Phillip Vaughan at The University of Dundee.

Attendees were invited to discuss favourite comic pages and why they liked them. I went along armed with two related pages.

Photo by Damon Herd.

As I said on the day, choosing your favourite comics page is an impossible task, so what I decided to do was concentrate on the first page I can remember appreciating for the comics storytelling devices it used, as opposed to purely enjoying the story for what was happening in it. I had definitely read comics prior to this, such as The Dandy and Spider-Man, but here is where I took a step towards appreciating comics for being comics…

This is Star Wars by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, which puts us in the late 1970s. It would have been a case of me asking my Dad for this because it said Star Wars in big letters on it, in much the same way that I wanted the ice lolly, bubble gum cards, etc.

To set up the story of this page: As the cantina sequence in the movie had been so memorable and popular with audiences, one of the first things to occur in the comics was a visit to a similar establishment. Over the preceding couple of pages, the green lizard alien shown here has been bullying Han Solo, who at first displays his usual bravura self in dealing with this, and tells his aggressor to get lost before his wookiee friend beats him up. But Chewbacca has taken a temporary leave of absence and as Solo realises his predicament, so do we as readers. The lizard throws Solo across the room in the last panel of the page before this one.

In the first panel above he lands in the arms of Chewie. We now know where the story is going. The tables have been turned and Chewbacca is hopefully going to put the alien in his place. The page builds up nicely to this, the bully now going from offensively cocksure to scared.

Crucially, and the part that impressed me as a kid, was that we do not get to see the point of impact when Chewbacca moves from passive to aggressive. The scene switches to outside and the lizard is smashing through the window – we are left to picture for ourselves Chewbacca hitting him.

A couple of years after I read that, the 1962 Hulk page above by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was reprinted in a UK Hulk Annual. They were printed on nicer paper than the US comics, explaining the clarity of the page over the Star Wars one. I’ve written about it on this blog before, and decided to take it along for this talk as Kirby is applying the same device as Chaykin i.e. we don’t get to see the Hulk hitting the Human Cannonball.

This page also has a lot of other artistic merits; the movement and weight of the Hulk is dramatically shown in the third, fourth, fifth and seventh panels. The extreme angle switches for each panel are cleverly designed and effortless for the reader to understand. It’s a great example of Kirby’s prowess.

The decision to not actually depict the hero striking the villain in these two pages gives us two examples of the story telling trope of showing, and not telling. This practice does not apply only to physical action, but that was a great place to start for me as a kid.

Twenty years later Scott McCloud explained this in his very influential book Understanding Comics, but I was lucky enough to pick it up firsthand while sitting on my couch eating sweets and reading about Star Wars and The Hulk.

WILD SPACE

I’ve been looking forward to this book for months. It’s a collection of odds and ends.

Back in the 70s and 80s Marvel UK reprinted Marvel US comics. They generally did so in black and white on a weekly basis instead of monthly, and hence used up more of the material than was being produced.  For Spider-Man and the Hulk and the other heroes, there was a ten year backlog of comics, and so this wasn’t going to cause a problem any time soon. For Star Wars though, there was a problem, and so Carmine Infantino got to work pencilling, with two inkers alternating to get the stuff produced more quickly. The result was that uniquely, Star Wars Weekly was printing the stories before they were appearing in the US comics. The Marvel US comics are the reprints.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back movie was released in 1980, there were a good few stories that were just dropped from the Marvel US schedule. I didn’t realise the extent , and was surprised that so many are therefore seen as obscure.

Also from Marvel UK are a series of original comics produced in the UK by creators such as Alan Davis, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, John Stokes, etc. Some of these were already reprinted in the 1990s by Dark Horse in colour, and are presented as such here. With these stories, original covers like this one by Alan Davis aren’t included in the book.

A cheeky thing to note is that although Dark Horse are not hiding altogether that these are Marvel Comics, they have gone to the trouble of whiting out “Stan Lee Presents…” from the start of every chapter and replacing it with “Lucasfilm Presents…”

Of note too are Blackthorne’s 3D comics, published between the 1986 cancellation of Marvel Star Wars and the 1991 Dark Horse series starting up. All three are here, starting with the “Tenth anniversary” #1. The 3D effects have been done away with, and it’s nice to look at these for the first time in 25 years without straining my eyes. I do miss the effect Blackthorne created for the camouflage net on these pages though.

A lot of nice curiosities here, nice to have the Pizzazz magazine stories by Howard Chaykin and Tony Dezuniga, and Gary Erskine’s art is good clean fun too.

MARVEL STAR WARS #108 (or MUG ME, MARVEL)

Marvel was licenced to make Star Wars comics in the 70s and 80s, creating the original run which featured many creators including Howard Chaykin, Mary Jo Duffy, Michael Golden, Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino, Cynthia Martin, David Mazzucchelli, Tom Palmer, Walt Simonson and Al Williamson.

Being a big Star Wars fan, I read all of them. The series ran from 1977 to 1986. The next Marvel Star Wars comic was scheduled to be a series called Dark Empire by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy, but the rights lapsed and Dark Horse picked it up instead. They’ve published Star Wars comics since 1991. Unlike Marvel, who put out one ongoing series with limited related titles, Dark Horse have continually brought out an ever changing roster of series. It was too much to keep up with for me. I still keep an eye out for good Star Wars comics, but haven’t felt the desire to buy them all since after Dark Empire 2 back in 1994.

Now that Disney has bought Lucasfilm, speculation is rife about Marvel getting the licence back. Disney owns Marvel, so it might make sense. However there have been other Disney properties which feature in comics not made by Disney, so it’s not a certainty. And anyway I thought to myself, who cares? Doesn’t make any difference to me who’s publishing Star Wars. But then it occurred to me: Marvel could get the rights back and publish Star Wars #108.

The completist in me would find it very hard not to buy that!