BC: STAR WARS #10

Just as he was an enormous fan of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, my friend David Steckel was also a hardcore acolyte of STAR WARS, and he purchased each monthly issue of the Marvel comic based upon that storied film with almost religious zeal. It’s a bit alien to think of from the vantage point of today, but apart from the eventual release of the “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” novel, the monthly Marvel STAR WARS comic was the only place one could turn to find additional adventures of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and company (at least until the newspaper strip launched.) I wasn’t as enamored of STAR WARS at the time, though my younger brother Ken certainly was. But this didn’t stop David from loaning me the run of comics that he’d collected in the hopes of turning me into a convert. As I’d already read the first nine issues from copies my brother had scored in the 3-Bags that had proliferated ever since the movie turned out to be a massive blockbuster, issue #10 was the first one that was new to me.

Famously, it was editor Roy Thomas who brokered the deal for Marvel to adapt STAR WARS. Publisher Stan Lee wasn’t really all that interested at first, but Roy wore him down. And a good thing, too, since the sales of the STAR WARS comic in all of its multiple reprintings and editions were staggering, and may have single-handedly kept the company afloat during a sales downturn. Both Roy and artist Howard Chaykin had been personally requested by George Lucas–Roy due to his adeptness in adapting the work of Robert E. Howard and Chaykin thanks to his own science fiction work such as IRON WOLF and CODY STARBUCK. The adaptation ran for six issue, after which new stories had to be devised. But at this point, the only canon was that very first film. So Roy did what he did and just started to make up a bunch of new stuff.

Roy decided to pretty much lift the plot of the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai whole cloth for the first new story. The plot involved Han Solo and Chewbacca being hired on to protect a village under siege by Cloud Raiders. Solo subcontracts the job, assembling a team of additional mercenaries including anthromorphic green rabbit-alien Jaxxon, a faux Jedi called Don-Wan Kihotay and a boy who calls himself the Starkiller Kid, all of whom were riffs on other established characters. The leader of the Cloud Raiders was named Serji-X Arrogantus, who was a broad parody of MAD and future GROO creator Sergio Aragones. It was a weird mix of elements, and by this tenth issue, both Roy and Chaykin seem as though they’ve had enough. They weren’t yet earning any royalties from the sales of the book (or they might have stuck around longer) and there were other things that they wanted to do with their time. So Roy turned the scripting over to his novelist friend Don Glut, and Chaykin limited his involvement to breakdowns which were finished by Tom Palmer.

The whole adventure feels less like STAR WARS than one of the many knock-offs that proliferated in the wake of the movie’s massive success, such as BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS. There is one page that feels a bit more like the film, a subplot page in which Princess Leia pilots a spacecraft in the hopes of locating the missing Luke Skywalker, who vanished while on a mission the previous issue. Otherwise, this story is a straight-up space western, albeit one with giant monsters to fight as well as black-hatted bad guys. And I have to say, as a reader I liked it a lot more than typical STAR WARS shenanigans. It didn’t hurt, I expect, that Solo’s crew of mercenaries felt like a super hero team, each one having specific traits or powers. That was more my idiom at this point.

As this concluding chapter gets under way, the old Shaman of the village has succeeded in awakening the colossal behemoth that legends say has slept underneath the town for generations, hoping that it will wipe out their oppressors. Which it probably will–but not without taking the rest of the town to say nothing of Solo and his crew with them. So for the moment, all hands turn in unison to battle the enormous creature, but with only limited results. Looking for a way out, Serji-X figures that if he kills the old Shaman that might stop the behemoth. But as he rockets to blast down the old man, both figures are stepped on and crushed into paste by the colossus.

But the day isn’t saved yet, as the irate behemoth continues to stomp around causing chaos and havoc, and Solo figures that it’s up to their crew to put the thing down. But that proves more difficult to accomplish than expected, and his guys are pummeled and almost pulverized by the thing. Ad a key moment, Don-Wan makes a solo attack on the behemoth, and the lightsaber he wields seems to have some aggravating effect on the monster. So Chewbacca carries Solo to where Don-Wan is fighting and relieves him of his weapon, charging the monster with the lightsaber himself. He’s able to stab the behemoth in the chest with the weapon, which causes it to react in agony.

And then the damn thing blows up in an explosion of pyrotechnics, the energy of the lightsaber mixing catastrophically with the internal energies that power the monster’s own cranial energy beams. And that’s a wrap. The crew is paid its meager wages by the surviving villagers and Solo and Chewbacca head out towards new adventures–which include getting the Millennium Falcon out of hock. It was a perfectly fine story, but it doesn’t really feel like STAR WARS. In fact, it could have featured just about any other Marvel licensed property, from JOHN CARTER, WARLORD OF MARS to TARZAN, with only minor adjustments. And that, more than anything else, was its failing. There maybe wasn’t much material to draw upon, but this simply didn’t feel like STAR WARS.

The Star Words letters page includes a note from future Marvel letterer and assistant editor Mike Heisler. It’s also got a bit of editorial text from Roy explaining why both he and Howard Chaykin are leaving the series at this point. One gets the sense that Roy didn’t have any particular strong feelings about the assignment and wasn’t wild about trying to come up with new adventures in and around the single existing film–particularly as talk about a sequel began to pick up.