Age 14/15/16? | 1982/83? Ooh… grumpy! Somebody needs to relax the kacks.

Art Notes

han solo covering threepio's mouth comic page detail

There’s some really nice drawing in this page, especially panel 1, which was obviously copied form Al Williamson—again! Well, if you’re going to copy, copy from the best!

I think that awesome looking photo clipping came form a magazine, maybe my mum’s ‘Woman’s Own’, which did an interview with Mark Hamill and had loads of fab photos in it. Most of them went into my scrap book. I recall Mark saying how he didn’t like makeup—or lots of make-up on women. I also recall how scrumptious his wife looked in one of the shots.

millennium falcon on th run from imperial star destroyers comic page detail

The photo reminds me of the first time that I actually saw those scenes of the Falcon being pursued by the Imperial Destroyer previewed on TV, with tumbling asteroids, flashing lasers, and John Williams’ ‘Imperial March‘ blaring. And it just about blew my mind to pieces when I first saw it on TV. I remember that my dad and I went for a walk with the dog afterwards and I talked about it constantly. He must have been rolling his eyes. I just kept replaying that 2 seconds or whatever it was over and over as we walked. I was replaying and humming the music too and craving listening to the soundtrack album, whenever it came out.

The technical achievement of putting those scenes together blows me away still. I tell me son, “You know, that stuff was done without CGI, it was all photographic, with models!” The space battle scenes in Return of the Jedi seem even more technically impossible, with so many camera passes over the same strip of film rewound and re-exposed so many times. Funny thing is, in Jedi, it seems to have less impact. For me anyway.

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