Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

c.1981/82? | 13 years old? This is a good line from Han Solo! How can he crack jokes about such an  agonising, imminent death? I mean it’s minutes or even seconds away! There can’t be many worse ways to die. The novelisation cracks an extra but somewhat laboured joke about this.

Solo: “One thing’s for sure, we’re all going to be much thinner. This could prove popular for slimming. The only problem is its permanence.”
–1977 Novelisation, Alan Dean Foster

Art Notes

If you read through it you’ll no doubt be confused by the last line of dialogue. What’s Luke afraid of? I mean, they’ve just been saved! But no, that’s Threepio’s speech balloon. See the red outline? Many of Threepio’s speech balloons were retrospectively outlined (badly) in red ink, presumably to distinguish his speech throughout the comic as being robotic or electronic. The Marvel version uses squarer balloons for him, for the latter reason.

A tight situation!

My favourite thing on this page, the only thing that makes me smile is once again what appears to be an example of bad planning! Let’s face it, if this comic was really well done, it wouldn’t be that interesting. In the 3rd last panel of Han – about to be crushed – it seems that the advancing wall was drawn first, followed by his head. What’s happened is that I tried to add extra drama and perhaps a little humour by making the wall press against his nose. Silly me, I found that the wall wasn’t close enough when I was drawing him, so his nose had to be extended out a bit in order to be pressed by the wall!

Back from Holidays

(written a few years ago) We’re back from our holidays in Baltimore, Co.Cork after 2 weeks. Although I kept up the 3 issues per week schedule while I was away, fighting a stoneage internet connection, I didn’t do everything I’d like to, such as the recent months’ «captioned and tweaked SW stills from the movie. They’re a feature which I think you’ve enjoyed (Please give some occasional feedback so I know? The site is just for fun/non-profit and feedback means a lot to me).

I’ll be starting a new job soon, after over a year of being freelance and I hope I can keep up the pace with the site. There may be delays due to making-a-living pressures or even a scaling back to 2 or even 1 issue/page per week.

Blue Milk Special: Resurrected

(Also written some years ago) Some of you will be familiar with SWa9’s good neighbour BlueMilkSpecial.com – the satirical Star Wars webcomic. Lately they suffered another dreadful technical catastrophe and were out of action for at least a month. Well, they’re back and with a cracker of a strip!

Blue Milk Special’s Continuing ‘Empire’ Satire

Rod and Leanne Hannah have spent countless hours on this non-profit labour of love (see: we’re simpatico?) but recently they’ve put significant finances into it too to get the site working again. Consequently they’re now running commercial banner advertising for the first time to recover costs. So next time you visit, please make a comment, click to give them a vote on TopWebComics and click an ad or two to support their efforts! Here’s one of my favourite strips!

Incidentally, BMS will also be in Baltimore soon. Not Baltimore, Ireland – but Baltimore Comic Con, USA. if you’re there, drop by and say hello to Rod and Leanne.