23: Luke Darts Under the Giant Snow Walker!
Age 13/14/15? | 1981/82/83? Cor… this is another action-crammed, snowspeeder-exploding page. You can really tell how much I wanted to be a comics artist when I grew up!
Script & Art Notes
This page owes nearly everything to Al Williamson’s version for Marvel. I hope he doesn’t mind. The only massively different bits are the silly sticker below—which for once is kind of funny—because I made improvements to it! “EEAGH!” (I wrote that dialogue myself)
More daft stickers
And the overhead view of Luke cutting open the belly of the Walker—below. Yep, little me, made that up meself! It’s also very nicely coloured-in with coloured pencils. I love it when I did that. They’re a great medium for adding colour really quickly at whatever shade and intensity you want. You don’t tend to see them in professional comics though! I mentioned before that my mate Niall F inspired me to use that coloured medium when he coloured in some of the artwork in my Marvel Star Wars Annual No.1. I just thought it looked fab. Up until then—when I was about 10 or 11, I couldn’t be bothered with colour. Sadly.
Hey—that’s… original!
The rest of the panels differ from the Marvel version only slightly, with slight reworkings or re-combinations of my own. This panel below is copied verbatim—or as well as I could manage at such a tender age—from Marvel.
BOWM! Great sound.
And the first panel of Luke in the Snowspeeder is another attempt to copy Al Williams’ art. His version looks really brilliant. He simply must have had a great still image of that scene to work from.
Not much else to say about this really. Except, what kid who enjoyed all of those stop-motion dinosaur movies—especially the Ray Harryhausen ones—could not have loved this battle with the lumbering Walkers? My absolute favourite scene in Jason and the Argonauts—my favourite film until Star Wars hit—was of Jason sneaking up on the bronze giant and unscrewing the cap on his heel and letting all of its life-force flow out. In some ways this part of the Walker battle is kind of similar to this Argonauts scene—don’t you think?
Todd Armstrong—as Jason—unscrews the heel of the unsuspecting bronze giant Talos!
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More on Niall F colouring my annual:
Oh yes, this scene resonated strongly with my 10-year-old self, too. My friend and I would ride our snowspeeder bicycles in full speed attack runs and turn in circles to trip up walkers. We brought down tons of those things! I remember looking forward to winter that year so we could tromp around in the snow with our blaster-shaped sticks. I even had a brown-and-tan winter coat!
Faaaaantastic, Phil!
Sigh… those were the days 🙂