040: Luke and C-3PO search for R2-D2
mid 1978? | age 10? The search for R2-D2 begins in this comic page from sometime in 1978, when I was 9 or 10 years old – so it’s one of my favourites. I suppose it’s impossible to convey the magical sense of nostalgia I feel when I see these earliest pages.
Background Notes
I’m reminded of the excitement of something like Star Wars in a grey, depressing and depressed Ireland of the late ’70s. This is the place that Star Wars hit in 1977 – without much of a ripple for most ordinary country folk.
Ballymore Eustace 1966: Catholic Church centre, Davis’ shop would be left – where we bought SW bubble gum cards. The oft-mentioned ‘Maguire’s’ newsagent was further up the road.
It was a small country village into which I was suddenly dropped from Scotland. I went to what was – at that time – a dreary, smelly little local ‘National School’. It was in total contrast to my previous award-winning non-fee-paying Robert Douglas Memorial School in Scone, Perthshire. That one was grand and interesting. At RDMS we moved from room to room during the day, depending on the activities; faced each other at hexagonally arranged desks in some sort of progressive fashion; enjoyed a large gym with drama, dance, crafts, projected films and even – gasp – ART and Craft classes. But that was in Scotland.
Typical old Irish National School. Our one had a tall tower beside it that we imagined was a torture building – or guard tower with MG-55 machine gun. I featured this in my Between * Wars comic! »
The one in Ireland was a Dickensian, row-upon-row of oak desks arrangement. The classroom sometimes smelled like vomit, was dirty, and you stayed in the same room – all day. Maybe it smelled of vomit because of all the oak furniture and floors (or maybe it was just vomit). The big old radiators were on full blast on the hottest summer days, with the sun roasting us through the huge windows. In winter the heating broke down and we froze, having to go outside and do teacher-led star jumps to warm up. The emphasis was on teaching Irish children the skills to get get jobs: Reading, Riting and Rithmetic, along with Irish, Geography, History and Religion. NO Art class, NO crafts, no gym. Sod all.
No wonder Niall and I dedicated so much time and effort drawing all over those oak desks! Check out our desk-art in my other (grown-up) comic—Between * Wars!
Drawing on desks in my other comic: Between * Wars Go See it
Art Notes
Figure drawing for beginners
Some Shockingly bad but charming drawing opens this chapter. I can’t believe the lack of effort that went into that night sky in the top panel!
Threepio is either doing that ‘Shielding the eyes’ gesture that people do when trying to spot something – or scratching his head in puzzlement. Either way, they’re nice human touches.
Luke has the Kirk Douglas style dimple in the chin. In my young drawings, chin dimples always featured – by default. I think there might have been a fashion for them in the ’70s when comic artists drew heroic types, and when TV and movie people cast them. After Star Wars, I certainly wished I had one. In olden times you could buy a device that clamped around your head, and by means of a thumb-screw it would press a dimple into the chin! I’ve also added the scars to Luke’s face.
The discovery of Artoo here is pretty comical looking. Luke, hands on hips, taps his foot in irritation. Note the way the ground obligingly dips to accommodate the landspeeder engine in the composition. Sir Anthony Blunt said something similarly sarcastic about a painting by Fra Angelico (I think it was…)
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NOTES
(* We moved from Scotland in 1977 and stayed in Bessbrook, Northern Ireland for a few months before moving down to the South when I was to start in my new school. But we had to live for a time in a Gate-Lodge near the ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village’ of Sallins, County Kildare; while we waited for our very own cowboy-builder to finish our new house.
The Gate lodge was creepy. In a dark wood, in the middle of nowhere – odd things happened while we were there. Later we discovered the whole area was notoriously haunted!)
. . .
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(Wide-shot of the Lars Homestead, at night. Luke and Threepio are scanning the horizon for Artoo Detoo)
"No sign of him" sighs Luke, peering through his macrobinoculars. "We'll have to go tomorrow."
PANEL 2
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'So next day--'
We see the tail-end of Luke's landspeeder exiting the scene of the Lars Homestead and the twin Tatooine suns.
PANEL 3
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(Close-up shot of Luke's face)
"Hey!" he calls to Threepio, as he spots something.
PANEL 4
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(Wider shot of the parked landspeeder, 3PO, Luke and R2)
"Hmmph!" sounds Threepio as he looks in irritation at Artoo. Luke taps his foot, hands on hips and says to Artoo, "So R2... we've (...)"
(Continues on next page)
Hi John, I like the dimple comment, it’s very interesting.
I feel slightly uncomfortable with the anti-irish slant to the commentary but I imagine you are just being honest about how you felt having to go to that genuinely dirty school. I think the building was quite good, from the 50s, but wasn’t kept clean and the home economics room, which would have been a perfect art studio, wasn’t even used (I think it was an overflow classroom). I think it all went down hill because there was probably a population explosion in the 70s when the council estate was built.
I really like how Luke is tapping his foot, by the way.
Hi Candace,
I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. It WAS grim back then. Really miserable. It looked like some Soviet Bloc country. Dublin city centre’s quays along the River Liffey were lined with empty and missing buildings. Many held up with wooden props. Described often as being like a “Row of broken teeth.”
I wonder what Niall’s take on it is?
Hiya, yep I remember what the quays looked like, all the Georgian (and / or Victorian?) buildings being left to fall down.
And yes, you’re right Candace. That would have been fantastic art room. Home Ec? I’d no idea. Huge space with big windows on 3 sides.
I was in it once – getting my eyes and health checked in 6th year. Failed the eye test – but dreading the prospect of glasses, I threw the letter to mum and dad into the river!
Yes, the foot-tapping is great!
I remember we had fun running around that field. It felt huge then. It was lined on one side with bushes which made little dens and if you were naughty (which I was) you could sneak through small boy burrow holes in the fence at the top of the field to the edge of the sandpit and Danger! We used to perfect our ‘being blasted backwards’ like fallen storm-troopers when we weren’t leaping from the top of the steps or dodging between the pillars of the grotty shelters for one last assault on the water tower before having to line up behind Conway and that awful bell. It would pour rain upon us and we’d huddle and then shuffle all urgency through the door to the musty cloakroom to take off your sodden wet coat to hang on a hook over more sodding wet coats, the insides of yours now being wet as are you too as the whole school in sodden wet coats brushes past you in the narrow confines. May as well have gone without coat on. Back to class and quick chicken soup for Conway.
Wonderful N, that brought back all sorts of memories.
“Being blasted backward” in the sandpit. Love it! Conway’s soup? He used to sit in front of us on a backward chair, drinking it, as he recounted some glorious piece of Irish Republican history (which I enjoyed). Didn’t enjoy the consumption of the soup much though. The smell… ugh. Packet soup.
He would sit there creaking back on the chair before slamming it down, starting us from our game of inkwell finger illusions, or gouging huge chunks out of the desk with a compass or covering our Aisling notebooks with dogfights. Behind him on the wall a long clean blackboard, above that a P&O ferries map of the world, to its right ‘The Proclamation’ and beside that an incredibly detailed map of Ireland with every village mentionable including ours in sepia-tones. I pored over that map, and then the stains on the walls, anything but Conway’s inane buffoonery. When he’d finished pumping us for gossip, he’d ask a question without looking at you, something simple, innocuous. I always had a brain cell devoted to attend, that being all it required.
BLASTED LIMITED TECHNOLOGY! Why – oh why! – can’t give more than 1 ‘thumb-up’ to your post?
Quoting N.:
“He would sit there creaking back on the chair (…) that being all it required.”
Ha ha that’s brilliant!!!!
N certainly has his moments. Where you in Conway’s class Candace?
“Go man go! Go man GO!”