Star Wars saves Marvel

[ctc]

How Star Wars Saved the Comic Book Industry

What's interesting about this is how much the situation would replay itself a few years later with GI Joe. As I recall, nobody at Marvel wanted to work on the book, which was seen as a dead end job cranking out monthly ads for a toy line. Which is why Hama got the job; he was low man, and why nobody paid attention to the changes he made.

Don C.

[Bruce Banner]

Still love those early SW issues.
Finally managed to complete my full collection of Marvel SW last year, which I began in 1977.

Also a big fan of Marvel's Galactica and Logan's Run series.

[MIB41]

Interesting revelation. I have multiple copies of that original run. And often considered them valueless since the 90's. I didn't think they would be worth much these days.

[ctc]

>Still love those early SW issues.

Me too; even reading them nowadays. The weird stuff made the galaxy seem huge. Something I don't like about the later ones.... or the new comics.... is that the focus on depth and plot removes a lot of the wackiness, and the galaxy feels kinda small.

>I didn't think they would be worth much these days.

I don't think MOST of them are. I've been putting together a set for the last year or two, and have snagged most of them for cheap. Often in bundles for less than a buck a piece. There ARE a few expensive,and genuinely rare ones though. The last issue is pretty pricey. (At least for someone looking for reading copies.) And there's a version of issue 2 that's valuable.

Don C.

[megoscott]

What an interesting article, thanks. That comic con photos is very cool to see.

[samurainoir]

My favorite ones were after Jedi came out and they kind of had free reign to do whatever because no one else was really looking or paying attention.

Just like when the original three Zahn novels came out and they weren't beholden to the movie continuity. Then they started coming out with more novels and the Shadows of the Empire Multi media event, suddenly everything had to be in a cohesive timeline and post-movie continuity. The quality of all that stuff really drops off once they are working on it via committee, or having to dance between the rain drops once again.

[MIB41]

I will say this... That was back in the day when Star Wars was not only a standard, it was an event.

[johnmiic]

When they revived Star Wars for comics, ala Dark Empire, I recall the artist Cam Kennedy, told Starlog most artists would turn down Star Wars as an assignment when offered it. They wouldn't work on it because you had to draw all the hardware and it had to be accurate. Thinking back that could be why a lot of artists wouldn't work on books like Micronauts, G.I. Joe, The Nam, Transformers, Star Trek. They felt overwhelmed by all the tech. It took a certain calibre of artist, Infantino, Golden, Williamson, Simonson, Frenz, to work on the book.

[samurainoir]

One of my favourite Star Wars artists is Kilian Plunkett.


I think we've also discussed recently how underrated Jan Duursema is.

[Figuremod73]

Infantino and Williamson are the two artist i associate the most with star wars. along with Mcquarrie (sp?) of course. one of the best and successful movie tie ends of the early eighties.

[jwyblejr]

Lucas didn't like Jaxxon but later gives us Jar Jar. Sheesh.

[torgospizza]

I think we've also discussed recently how underrated Jan Duursema is.

She's improved immensely from Arion, Lord of Atlantis. Although I will say back then her look was very unique. Kind of reminded me of Grell a bit--the people were lanky.

I'm not sure Carmine Infantino ever once tried to get the tech right when he was on Star Wars. I'm not sure he even tried to keep the tech consistent between panels! Don't get me wrong, though--his stuff was dynamic as heck.

[enyawd72]

Yeah, I really loved the Marvel SW stuff...my all time favorite issue was "Death Probe".

I read and re-read that book until it fell apart...

[MicromanZone]

I remember attempting to track down the #1 issue at various sources. And I also learned how to tell the difference between first run #1 issues and the almost infinite amount of reprints and repackaging Marvel would put those first 6 issues through. Never got anything more than fairly worthless reprints, but many tracking those Star Wars comics down was a daunting task for a kid back in the day.

[Bruce Banner]

Yeah, the first print of the 35 cents price variant of issue 1 is the big one, with a potential value of $ 3,000.

The final few issues of the series are also fairly scarce because they had such low print runs by that point.