Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

c.Early 1978/age 9 or 10 The Millennium Falcon goes in arse-first. Now this is more like it, readers! It’s one of my favourite pages of the whole book. I love it because of:

“C’mon you creeps!”
“Yeah, we’ve captured a ship!”
–Star Wars age 9

…and:

• It’s a really old one!
• There’s a sense of urgent action—focused on the beardy Death Star Officer and his over the shoulder command (really rude!); which, incidentally conjures an impression of yet more action and more off-screen players.
• And because of the absolute silliness of the dialogue. The opening lines are daft enough, but what about the final speech bubble by Han, at the bottom? An attempt at humour?

No, no, no. Intentional humour is never ever going to work. Far better playing it straight, like the characters in the movie Airplane. When you’re only 9 or 10, the silliness just… comes by itself. Still, I’m glad I did it. Completely daft.

Death Squad Commander with Anger Problem

Notice how “YOU BET SIR!” has been changed from “YOU BET LUKE”? This was supposed to make this older page flow from a latterly inserted page. I can’t find the page that originally led into this one. It’s all a bit of a puzzle at times.

Ah, I feel good now after seeing this. Can I hold off adding more pages until the Friday Edition?

Film Notes

“The’re “draggin” us in backwards, not me! But as far as they’re conserned it dosen’t matter!”
–Star Wars age 9

On the DVD I have of the lambasted first version of the Special Edition—the commentaries are wonderful. Ben Burtt’s is especially fascinating. But George Lucas talks about the Falcon in the Death Star hangar and the fact that it’s parked pointing into the station. When it came to them making their getaway it struck them that it posed a bit of a practical problem. They hadn’t considered how it would get out!

The funny thing is, I’m looking at this page, and young me seemed to have prepared for this problem by having the Falcon dragged in backwards. And I don’t think it was in the novelisation or anything, but I should probably check. It’d be very funny if the Falcon was making a beeeep-beeeep-beeep reversing sound!