Lit Comics A Look Back at Dark Horse Star Wars, Year By Year: Now Discussing 1998 [WARNING: IMAGE INTENSE]

I hadn't seen that (was typing my post while yours came up).

Its better. But that's a pretty low bar to be up against lets admit here.

 

But very pervasive at the time, especially the colouring model which was your standard 4-colour approach.

Classic Star Wars shows what can really be done when that is done skilfully, but DE departed from it completely in quite radical fashion.

 

Fair point.

But looking at comics from the 80s (specifically G.I. Joe and Transformers), even with the limited colour plates, you can do better.

 

SW or standard superheroes? I mean if you're talking this:



But I wouldn't say it was the norm! (Probably why I was so unimpressed with superhero art for years, I'd been spoiled.)

 

Not the norm admittedly, but it does show what the potential was to do with the art.

Now I know know nothing about the printing process for comics, so there may be a good reason they had to limit themselves to the 4 colour thing (cost, tech, whatever), but if it was possible to do the art above 5 years earlier I don't see why things regressed so badly in the 90s.

(Please note, this is from someone who only follows Star Wars, Joe and TF comics, so I know little about the industry as a whole)

 

To be fair DH, that image is from the UK Transformers comic and it was quite impressive. Then again, it regularly broke the "rules" such as they were.

All I'm really getting at though is the likely reason for why DE would have stood out at the time.

The advances in colouring tech have transformed comics for the better over the last decade, thus....

 

Palpatine coming back does not bother me. Him coming back is almost expected imo. I like the idea Chosen One Prophecy but don't set everything by that. Luke grappling with the Dark Side again is meh but we get Luke and Leia together fighting the Emperor. Should have done something like this in ROTJ. Works for me. Also Luke fighting Palpatine without without Anakin around interests me.

 

Was Classic Star Wars collected in any of the "A Long Time Ago" Omnibuses?

 

I was under the impression those collected just Marvel issues.

 

Thought so, I was hoping eventually it had other stuff.

 

Well, I'm not familiar with the Omnibuses so you may get a better answer in due course!

Back to DHC circa 1991-92 - their SW books were printed on better paper than the superhero books, cost a bit more but had no ads in the story pages and, in the case of DE, card and painted covers! This was, by any standard, a high-level production job by a then much smaller player!

The success of that quite risky strategy was demonstrated by DHC having to do second prints of the early DE issues due to the demand!

 

Classic Star Wars has not been collected in the Omnibus program yet. Hopefully they will before December.

 

I still remember Dark Empire fondly, it was such an epic adventure. I wasn't even reading any comics that far back, except maybe for some TinTin books. Though I remember I found out about Dark Empire after reading through the JAT and wondering about all these events that the books referenced that didn't appear in any other novel. Actually had to go find a comic book store and pick up the TPB. Think I still have that TPB lying around somewhere too. Though never did get into collecting individual issues until much, much later, so by then all the early DH issues were long gone. Oh well, I still treasure that first TPB, if I can ever find it again.

 

I sort of wish that Lucas had kept this idea. So many possibilities.

 

Yeah, I think Dark Empire is pretty close to what Episode VII-IX would have been if Lucas didn't get divorced and adopt a child and get burned out on doing the films.

I do wonder if the sister thing is a hindsight matter insofar as that it came up during Return of the Jedi discussions, but it only came up because the films were ending there, and they needed to resolve "there is another," but if they truly didn't plan on ending the series with Episode VI, it wouldn't have been Luke's sister.

To try to put it succinctly, I wonder if Kurtz is confusing the drafts there.

 

And got on his Anakin is the Chosen One thing.

 

I don't think that existed until the mid-nineties.

I guess to elaborate on my earlier point, Lucas has admitted that "there is another" was a meaningless line in story terms and it was thrown in to demonstrate that Luke could die. It wasn't meant to be Leia when it was written, and I question that it was even meant to be Luke's sister at all. I could be wrong about that though, because IIRC before "Father Skywalker" was Vader, there might have been mention about a sister, so I suppose I'll have to check that again. But if not, then I think the idea of Luke having a sister was invented to explain that line, and that line only required explanation when it was decided that the saga would conclude with VI, so the idea might not have existed when the discussions about a sequel trilogy were going on.

 

Didn't Luke's sister exist as a separate character before she became Leia? I thought that was a major switch, not something that didn't come up until the early drafts of ROTJ.

 

Yeah, I just looked up the Brackett script, and Skywalker asks Luke if his uncle ever told him about Nellith.

Still, I think Kurtz is conflating a lot of different ideas that were had at different times which were not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas, but not ideas that would have existed in the same narrative if VI wasn't the end. But I do agree that Dark Empire resembles the general premise which a sequel trilogy would have gone on if only Vader was dealt with in VI.

 

Dark Empire's spooky atmosphere and coloring really put you in the story, but I'm not sure that it really "feels" Star Wars because of it. Classic Star Wars is just a little too clean and shiny, basically the opposite of the murky and dim Dark Empire. I really liked the point about how Star Wars should feel "lived in", which is why we see broken down speeders, and sand blowing into ship parts and constant jury-rigged repairs. Dark Empire goes too far that way, basically feeling like a post-apocalyptic world with people downtrodden in the mud, and the heroes just surviving through insane bloodshed and terror, and not really thriving.

Classic Star Wars is a little too clean. Especially in "The Early Adventures", Luke's farmer garb is always shown to be incredibly pristeen and white, as though its supposed to be some sort of futuristic garb and not the simple duds of a farmhand. A lot of the cities we see are classically futuristic with the Empire coming to squash and destroy them. Though I will give it credit, in the Executor storyline and the Tanith Shire backstory, we get a very lived in universe, what with automated droid barges, supply tugs, and a scavenger band that compiles armor from discarded Imperial weaponry. Very cool.

The more I've learned about Classic Star Wars, the more I'm disappointed that they edited the original comic strips so heavily. We got a lot of context and extra dialogue and scenes in the Sunday strips that were completely stripped from the Dark Horse repackages. I get that the Sunday strips were originally just "recaps", but I would have rather had a faithful reprint than an edited version just to make it more coherent. Or at least change some of the dialogue and keep the unique Sunday art in the book so that we don't miss all of Williamson and Manning's fantastic art.

 

Protectorate, good analysis of DE, CSW by Williamson/Goodwin, and CSW by Manning.

I think the whole point of DE was to look post-apocalyptic; the Empire & Emperor were back, Luke appeared to be going over to the dark side, and the galaxy was falling apart. Really enjoyed this dark & grim view, since it's so different from what we saw in the OT films (even ESB). And, the superb painted artwork by Cam Kennedy fits the story hand in glove...

Conversely, the Manning newspaper strips had a very 1950's sci-fi/space age/streamlined/Flash Gordon feel to them, which I think really worked for those particular strips.

And, the Goodwin/Williamson strips have a much rougher, lived-in tone (similar to the OT films), while still having a Flash Gordon-esque vibe.

I'm right with you that it would have been great if the Goodwin/Williamson strips (and even the Manning strips) had been reprinted in their entirety, unedited. However, I think DH wanted these to flow more like a regular comic book narrative, which is why they were so heavily edited.

IIRC, DH had plans to reprint at least the Goodwin/Williamson strips unedited at some point (it was tentatively announced several years ago). However, now that they will only have the SW license for the remainder of this year, I don't see that happening. Too bad, since there's no way I'm shelling out the $ for the Russ Cochran 3-volume HC set...

 

In each of the 3 TPBs there were excellent introductions, including one from Goodwin and one from Williamson, about the process used - it was very much a collaborative project. I suspect had either decided not to be involved, DHC wouldn't have gone ahead.