Marvel's Star Wars Comic Books

The past twenty years have made it difficult for me to be a Star Wars fan. When there was only the original three movies and hundreds of possibly non-canonical books it was kind of fun to occasionally connect with Lucas’ space fantasy tale to soak in the simple fun. But the prequels destroyed my ability to accept the larger SW world and, with those stupid entries, the obvious cracks in the expanding universe became impossible to ignore. The recently completed sequel trilogy was a mess of misplaced reverence and poorly chosen plot silliness that failed to do more than make me wish for the entire thing to just be done. Even the fact that I really enjoyed the two Disney produced stand along films ROGUE ONE and SOLO doesn’t make me much more of a fan, But those two side stories do make clear what I can still enjoy about the franchise.

When I was a kid the only ‘new’ Star Wars material readily available to excitement hungry fans was the Marvel comic book series. In between the 1977 film and the first sequel these comics told new tales of Han, Luke, Leia and the droids that were thrilling to our young minds and allowed the collective childhood imagination of what might be next to burst wide open. They were an amazing window into the possibilities for further adventures and, even if they felt slightly off sometime, we accepted these new stories like the starving devotees we were.

Of course, we were far too youthfully inexperienced to spot that the stories being told in these new SW comics were little more than direct steals from earlier things. I guess that we were so stunned by the cobbled together legends that Lucas stitched into his space opera script that it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the creators of the Marvel series would expect us to be clueless about their obvious plagiarism too. The first new Star Wars storyline in these four-color pages so blatantly lifts the plot of THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) by way of its western remake THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) that it’s impossible to miss now. Han Solo is placed in the role of a man hired to help a bandit troubled village fight off the pillaging bad guys. He recruits a band of misfit drifters willing to do the job for minimal pay and then enacts the aforementioned story. Since STAR WARS (1977) was mostly based on Kurasawa’s THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958) I guess stealing from another Kurasawa films was considered the safest way to get the series off to a solid start. Although this multi-part comic book version might be the first adaptation of the SEVEN SAMURAI story into science fiction it would be far from the last with the Roger Corman production BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980) being the one that did the least to hide its theft.

Rereading these old comics as an adult has been an interesting experience. Now I can see how stilted they are and I’m amused by the things that Marvel invented that subsequent movies swept away. They are of their times in many ways that surprise me with some strange additions to the central characters that might have been better than the ones the sequels eventually employed. Overall, these comics are a fun sideroad that I suspect fans of later generations would have trouble enjoying. I’m well aware that the kick I get from them is largely based on nostalgia as I remember the ways these issues spurred my imagination. They are a colorful window into a fanboy past that allowed a young me to see possible futures spread out with near infinite opportunities for star-spanning adventure. I suspect that the sadness I can sometimes feel about the inept path down which Lucas eventually took the franchise is a sense of loss about what could have been. As these flawed comic books show, there was so much potential and it has (to my mind) been squandered. If only they had used that seven foot tall green rabbit in the sequel films…..