Star Wars Comics Part 1: The Original Marvel Star Wars Run (1977-1987)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with another Star Wars post for you. However, it's not part of my My Star Wars Experience series because I wanna do a two part general overview on the early Star Wars comics. The first part, which is today's post, will be on the Marvel Comics run from 1977 to 1987, and then part 2, which will be next week's will be on the early Dark Horse comics from the early 90's. So let's get into it.

As part of the marketing campaign for Star Wars in the 70's, Lucasfilm made a deal with Marvel Comics to publish a comic book adaptation of the movie. Marvel began publishing the comic a month before the movie came out, so no major spoilers were revealed prior to the film's release. Not that it mattered since nobody was paying attention to the movie's production at this point in the game.

Following the movie's success and the success of the comic book adaptation, Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics re-negotiated their licensing agreement and starting with issue #7, new stories set after the events of the movie started being told. These stories were insanely wild and barely Star Wars stories, but the comic book medium, long before Bantam Spectra published Heir to the Empire, was able to expand the Star Wars Universe in a way that the early novels from Del Rey just weren't able to do.

Issue #24 was the first time we got a Star Wars story set during the Clone Wars. I guess George Lucas didn't put as many restrictions on what the Marvel Comics series could and couldn't tackle, as he did the Dark Horse comics, and the Bantam novels in the 90's being that he had no idea when or if he would ever do any movies set during the Clone Wars while he was working on The Empire Strikes Back from 1978 to 1980.

Speaking of The Empire Strikes Back, the movie was adapted into comic book form from issues 39-44 of the Marvel Comics series. Being that all the comic book artists had to work on was the script and some design sketches, Yoda looks nothing like he would in the movie. They changed that in later editions of the comic adaptation, but for the original issues and the initial digest collected edition, Yoda looks vastly different than he does in the movie.

The series continued until issue #107, which was published in 1986. By this point the movies had been completed and general interest in the trilogy had waned, leaving the fans to their own devices. The post-Return of the Jedi stories introduced Lumiya, the Dark Lady of the Sith, who has revenge against Luke in mind following her injuries during battle. She was an apprentice of Vader in this comic book series, but then later became Jacen Solo's Sith master in the Legacy of the Force book series in 2007.

In 2019 the series was revived for an 108th issue under the Star Wars Legends banner for Marvel's 80th Anniversary. To date this is the only Star Wars Legends comic to be published since Marvel took over the comic book license in 2015. 

Marvel published a comic book adaptation of Return of the Jedi in 1983. However, for whatever reason, the adaptation got its own four issue mini-series instead of being part of the main Star Wars comic book series like the adaptations for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back had been. Unlike the adaptations of the other two movies, the adaptation of Return of the Jedi didn't begin publication until five months after the movie's release.

While the movies finished in 1983, they weren't the only Star Wars stories made for film or television in the 80's. In 1985 two cartoons, Droids and Ewoks, were produced by Canadian animation studio, Nelvana, and aired on ABC. Ewoks was the first to have a comic book series based on it, under Marvel's Star Comics imprint, which had been created specifically for comic books based on animated series that Marvel owned the comic license for, but didn't originate with them. So, for example, the G.I. Joe and Transformers comics didn't fall under this imprint because both comics originated with Marvel and weren't just licensed to them by Hasbro.

The Ewoks comic ended in 1987, after a two year run, and one year after the main Star Wars comic had ceased publication. Though Marvel would still own the comic book license for the saga until well into the production of Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy's six issue series, Dark Empire.

While Droids initially didn't have a comic book series when it debuted in 1985, by the time the series ended in 1986, it did. It was only an eight issue series though. The first five issues were completely original stories, not based on any of the episodes of the TV show. Instead they acted as a prequel to the cartoon, which is interesting.

The final three issues did something a little bit differently. Issues 6, 7, and 8 did a retelling of the original movie, but from the perspective of Artoo and Threepio. The final issue was published a month before the final issue of Ewoks.

So I have a very small history with this run of comics. Being that I wasn't born until the end of 1986, I missed the original run of all of these comics, as well as their omnibus collected editions by Dark Horse. However, I did get copies of the digest collected editions of the comic adaptations of Star Wars (issues 1-6), and The Empire Strikes Back (issues 39-44) from a friend while I was in high school, I also got issue #41 of Star Wars (part 3 of the The Empire Strikes Back adaptation) from someone for either my birthday or Christmas when I was a teenager. While I don't have that single issue anymore, I do still have the digest collected editions, and I currently have the 2020 Facsimile Edition reprint of Star Wars #1. I've never read any of the Droids or Ewoks comics. Trying to get a hold of these comics isn't difficult, but might be expensive, depending on where you find an issue, and which issue you find.

That's it for today's post on Star Wars comics. Next week I'll finish this short series off with a look at the early run of Dark Horse's long history with Star Wars. So until then have a great rest of the week and a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.