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krpalmerIt took me quite a while to pick up the first four volumes Dark Horse Comics reprinted the old Marvel Star Wars comics in, but after the idea finally hit me to include them instead of more DVDs in online store orders to reach the "free shipping" level, I wound up getting the fifth volume what seems really not that long after the fourth. It brings the comics right up to and just past Return of the Jedi; however, as Marvel adapted that movie as a four-issue miniseries, it's not included...
It seems that I was getting a little better at asking for issues of the Star Wars comic when I did see them. Of the fifteen issues (one an extended-length annual) in this volume, I had read eight of them, which made the gaps to be filled smaller and the overall effect of discovering what had been in them just perhaps not quite as great this time around... although I suppose that with the previous volume, I had often wanted to at last discover how our heroes got out of the cliffhangers they had wound up in twenty-five years before; with this volume, I was tending to see how they had got into the predicaments I had discovered them in all that time ago.
There were interesting moments all the same, if moments I would often have to class as now "inoperative." This volume seemed to begin with the "search for Han Solo" picking up again, and after what seems like a little bit of retroactive continuity where Princess Leia reflects that she couldn't afford the time to think about Han, she travels to the world of Mandalore, which should sound familiar to Star Wars fans... and in no time at all, she runs into someone in Boba Fett armour, only someone who happens to be "Fenn Shysa" instead. Fenn informs Leia that he, Boba Fett, and a third person in the same armour, "Tobbi Dala," were all "sent into the Clone Wars" after Palpatine created the Empire. (Fenn also seemed to learn what Leia looks like at around that time...) Boba Fett wound up getting fed up with fighting for other people and became a bounty hunter, but Fenn and Tobbi are still swell folks, if with ways of speaking that somehow leave me with an impression of Irishness I can't quite shake.
The volume wound up being "bookended" with Boba Fett stories, which I suppose lets me excuse him winding up on the cover. Right after Return of the Jedi, Han Solo returns to Tatooine to try and recover some money, only to find that an amnesiac Fett had been spat out of the Sarlacc. When Fett's memory returns, he shows a sudden and somehow surprising amount of antipathy to Han, and winds up crashing right back into the Sarlacc in a crashed Jawa sandcrawler... when "Dark Empire" had the same bright idea some years later, that time Fett stuck around in the Expanded Universe. (The comic also seemed to imply Artoo had been in the carbon freezing chamber in Cloud City to be able to recognise Fett, another odd point for me.)
In between, there's an issue that seemed to amount to the writers and editors realising that Wedge would be coming back once again in another Star Wars movie. To explain where he'd got to, a "filler" issue was dropped in where it was revealed that Wedge had been shot down trying to leave Hoth (flying a Y-wing, to boot) and stranded for months while his tailgunner Janson died by degrees. Wedge does finally manage to escape, taking out some battlefield scavengers on the way, but in some ways I can see how it may have been made "inoperative" in "the legend that is Wedge Antilles." (It also seemed to confuse Wedge and Biggs; Luke talks about Wedge having been his best friend on Tatooine...)
The "annual" issue included in this volume, although it may be as "inoperative" as the others that have stuck in my memory, is still a memorable one for me. The art is a bit rougher and more imprecise than the other issues seem to be, but the story is interesting in its own way... on a boring desert planet, a young man Flint runs into our heroes, reveals that he was also the son of a Jedi, and gets caught up in the battle. (Luke mutters along the way that his father was "a navigator on a spice freighter." At the time, my reaction was actually "Well, we don't know Darth Vader is really his father!" I guess the various adapations that I had read all seemed to downplay the scene near the end of The Empire Strikes Back where an exhausted Luke calls Vader "Father".) Unfortunately, the battle doesn't go well (for all that the Rebels manage to take a revenge of sorts for the battle of Hoth), and Darth Vader, having choked an incompetent officer along the way, finds a mourning Flint and promises great things for him... which now seems to contradict my views of Vader's characterization, the "Rule of Two," and just who may be inside stormtrooper armour. Still, the story interests me.
There's one issue that manages to be amusing to me for a slightly different reason. In it, Lando disguises himself in a costume that some have pointed out resembles that of the anime and manga character "Captain Harlock," a (somewhat) early sign of how some people in North America were beginning to pick up on one particular Japanese product. Nowadays, of course, there's also that amusing awareness that some anime fans seem as willing to dress up in costumes as some Star Wars fans. I also noticed that one panel in this issue is something of a "swipe" of one of Ralph McQuarrie's production paintings for Star Wars, although with a ship smaller than either of the two versions of the Millennium Falcon he painted in it.
It seems that I was getting a little better at asking for issues of the Star Wars comic when I did see them. Of the fifteen issues (one an extended-length annual) in this volume, I had read eight of them, which made the gaps to be filled smaller and the overall effect of discovering what had been in them just perhaps not quite as great this time around... although I suppose that with the previous volume, I had often wanted to at last discover how our heroes got out of the cliffhangers they had wound up in twenty-five years before; with this volume, I was tending to see how they had got into the predicaments I had discovered them in all that time ago.
There were interesting moments all the same, if moments I would often have to class as now "inoperative." This volume seemed to begin with the "search for Han Solo" picking up again, and after what seems like a little bit of retroactive continuity where Princess Leia reflects that she couldn't afford the time to think about Han, she travels to the world of Mandalore, which should sound familiar to Star Wars fans... and in no time at all, she runs into someone in Boba Fett armour, only someone who happens to be "Fenn Shysa" instead. Fenn informs Leia that he, Boba Fett, and a third person in the same armour, "Tobbi Dala," were all "sent into the Clone Wars" after Palpatine created the Empire. (Fenn also seemed to learn what Leia looks like at around that time...) Boba Fett wound up getting fed up with fighting for other people and became a bounty hunter, but Fenn and Tobbi are still swell folks, if with ways of speaking that somehow leave me with an impression of Irishness I can't quite shake.
The volume wound up being "bookended" with Boba Fett stories, which I suppose lets me excuse him winding up on the cover. Right after Return of the Jedi, Han Solo returns to Tatooine to try and recover some money, only to find that an amnesiac Fett had been spat out of the Sarlacc. When Fett's memory returns, he shows a sudden and somehow surprising amount of antipathy to Han, and winds up crashing right back into the Sarlacc in a crashed Jawa sandcrawler... when "Dark Empire" had the same bright idea some years later, that time Fett stuck around in the Expanded Universe. (The comic also seemed to imply Artoo had been in the carbon freezing chamber in Cloud City to be able to recognise Fett, another odd point for me.)
In between, there's an issue that seemed to amount to the writers and editors realising that Wedge would be coming back once again in another Star Wars movie. To explain where he'd got to, a "filler" issue was dropped in where it was revealed that Wedge had been shot down trying to leave Hoth (flying a Y-wing, to boot) and stranded for months while his tailgunner Janson died by degrees. Wedge does finally manage to escape, taking out some battlefield scavengers on the way, but in some ways I can see how it may have been made "inoperative" in "the legend that is Wedge Antilles." (It also seemed to confuse Wedge and Biggs; Luke talks about Wedge having been his best friend on Tatooine...)
The "annual" issue included in this volume, although it may be as "inoperative" as the others that have stuck in my memory, is still a memorable one for me. The art is a bit rougher and more imprecise than the other issues seem to be, but the story is interesting in its own way... on a boring desert planet, a young man Flint runs into our heroes, reveals that he was also the son of a Jedi, and gets caught up in the battle. (Luke mutters along the way that his father was "a navigator on a spice freighter." At the time, my reaction was actually "Well, we don't know Darth Vader is really his father!" I guess the various adapations that I had read all seemed to downplay the scene near the end of The Empire Strikes Back where an exhausted Luke calls Vader "Father".) Unfortunately, the battle doesn't go well (for all that the Rebels manage to take a revenge of sorts for the battle of Hoth), and Darth Vader, having choked an incompetent officer along the way, finds a mourning Flint and promises great things for him... which now seems to contradict my views of Vader's characterization, the "Rule of Two," and just who may be inside stormtrooper armour. Still, the story interests me.
There's one issue that manages to be amusing to me for a slightly different reason. In it, Lando disguises himself in a costume that some have pointed out resembles that of the anime and manga character "Captain Harlock," a (somewhat) early sign of how some people in North America were beginning to pick up on one particular Japanese product. Nowadays, of course, there's also that amusing awareness that some anime fans seem as willing to dress up in costumes as some Star Wars fans. I also noticed that one panel in this issue is something of a "swipe" of one of Ralph McQuarrie's production paintings for Star Wars, although with a ship smaller than either of the two versions of the Millennium Falcon he painted in it.