THE STAR WARS

Script: J.W. Rinzler | Art: Mike Mayhew
Colors: Rain Beredo | Lettering: Michael Heisler | Cover Art: Nick Runge

Nearly a year ago, when I began to cover the CLASSIC STAR WARS newspaper strip collections, I noted that I often enjoy, as a curiosity, licensed fiction based on well-known properties before their mythologies were set in stone. They give you an interesting look at what could have been, if creative decisions had gone in different directions. In a way, THE STAR WARS is almost a retroactive version of these sorts of situations.

The premise of THE STAR WARS is simply: what if George Lucas's original draft screenplay had been produced as a movie? There's a lot different in Lucas's earliest conception of his saga: Luke Skywalker is a veteran Jedi general. Han Solo is an alien. Darth Vader is just an Imperial agent -- not even a Sith, though the dark Jedi cult does play a role in the story.

Providing this adaptation of the draft script are writer J.W. Rinzler and artist Mike Mayhew. Rinzler is known for his extensively researched MAKING OF STAR WARS books -- the first of which covers the evolution of Lucas's original idea into the film it would ultimately become -- so he seems a reasonable and even obvious choice to write the story. I'm not certain how much actual creative work Rinzler did though, since this is ostensibly adapted from an already-existing script. I'm sure some polish must've been involved in the process, but there's no real way of telling how much has been changed.