Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

Age 12/13? | 1980/81? This leads into another one of those great scenes in Empire between Han and Leia.

This is the first page to feature those silly Empire Strikes Back alphabet stickers. I think I was probably looking forward to «collecting the cards like I did for the previous film and was disappointed on opening my first packet from the shop to discover that they were just rubbish stickers in the shapes of letters. What the hell..? They way I was as a kid, I regarded these as visually disappointing and practically useless. I mean, there may have been kids who thought, “Finally! Useful trading card thingies that you can stick on your wardrobe and schoolbag!” but I didn’t want to ruin them by peeling them off and sticking them on things were they could deteriorate. I wanted a nice bundle of glossy trading cards that I could look through in awe. The compromise then was to put them in this comic. It was a way of sticking them onto something in a useful way, that enhanced it’s official look, and that would last. This comic then, like the previous ‘Star Wars’ one becomes a sort of «cross between a comic and a scrapbook. Which looking at them now, is really nice. It seems that I didn’t buy many of these collectible stickers.  (more Star Wars Cards Pages)

Incidentally, I saw an old Star Wars scrapbook online once, and it was lovely. It was from the seventies, and you could see how the child had put absolutely anything to do with their beloved movie into it. Sweet wrappers, trading card wrappers, news clipings—anything with Star wars on it. I remember being like that myself, though I didn’t keep an actual scrapbook. If it had that logo on it, no matter what it was—garbage to most people—to me, it was a little bit of magic and couldn’t be thrown in the bin.

The scrapbooks are very cute and touching. So much love and devotion. Extremely evocative of the time and of childhood. More bittersweet still was that it was one bought at an some comic event or other. I was told that you do sometimes find them for sale. Sad really, but nice that some of them still exist.

An example of a kid’s Star Wars scrapbook

Art Notes

Glorious full colour! That’s one thing about this adaptation: I’d decided to raise the bar drawing-wise, but also in terms of colour. On my previous ‘Star Wars’ comic adaptation, colour was pretty scarce. I was more interested in getting stuff drawn—and fast!

But I seemed to be having some difficulty with oblique views of faces in this page, and I was still getting confused with those facial crease-lines—see the final panel of Han. But at least I was setting myself the challenge. It’s the only way to improve, isn’t it?

I’d love to read your comments below: Do you remember those trading sticker things from The Empire Strikes Back? What did you think of them? Go on, tell us all about it.