Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

c.1977 & 1978? | age 9 & 10? This is a messy but funny looking page. But then, it’s not like… MARK HAMILL’s gonna see it. Is he?

Mark Hamill knows this comic exists!

Neil Baker—reader and unpaid publicist for SWa9—used his one opportunity to Tweet a note to Mark the other day and it went like this:

Neil: “Love to get your take on this Mark 🙂 It’s a blog I’ve been following and enjoying (SWa9)”
Mark: “Love it! Lucky the Princess was so attractive, there weren’t many females to choose from in that galaxy, far, far away.”

That’s it—fortune awaits! Hmmm… I wonder which of my pictures of Leia he was referring to? Most of them are hideous! Well, no matter. Can you imagine if my 9 year old self had known that his hero—Luke Freaking Skywalker!—would see his comic some day? Can you? Can you?!?

Me, probably reading a Star Wars Annual c.1978? My hero looks down from the wall.

Fair dues to Mark, he’s a good sport. The page Neil showed him was the recent «makeup malfunction one. Oo-er…

And many thanks again to Neil! He’s finishing a major personal animation project now: Small Sacrifices, which will be hitting the festival circuit. (written a couple of years ago). So please check out the trailers, and enjoy the official website – the Production Gallery is very funny! but then, this is Neil Baker – right?

“…I’m here to rescue you with Han Solo.”
“ARR”
“..and Chewbacca!”

—Star Wars age 9, c.1977/1978

The Art of Tweaking: No Country for Big-Mouths

Click to see the different Stages. It’s a veritable multimedia extravaganza!

Today’s page is a hybrid-curio. It’s a very early one, but was subsequently tweaked. It must have been quite weird looking! Luke seems to have had a big tall head; we’ve seen a few of those: like «here and «here; and those odd diamond-shaped eyes. Chewie’s been copied from a Star Wars Weekly Comic pull-out poster or the trading cards ‘jigsaw’ puzzle. Do you see part of the Millennium Falcon behind his head? It’s funny, Chewie seems to be back standing in the Death Star hangar! What’s he doing there, at a time like this?

It starts in green felt-tip, but then Leia and Han are drawn in biro, then pencil! Han looks like Javier Bardem in a hall of convex mirrors—or the Hulk! I later made his mouth a bit smaller in pencil. What a weird drawing! And wait… there’s more: Han was dressed without his trooper armour. How could I forget that detail when I made the page?

Whizz-Bang Animation Feature!

Have a look at the stage-by-stage animation of the drawing of Han. I think I realised my error in omitting the trooper armour before I finished drawing Han’s waistcoat.

What sort of a page is this anyway? I wonder if it was originally a page with random images of Luke and Chewie at the top which was then salvaged for use in the comic. At points in my progression as an artist I’d discard old pages (God, I hate to think of it) but sometimes—it seems—I might look at an old page and think “Well, it’s not totally terrible. I’ll just tweak it a bit.”

“It’s not as if – I dunno, MARK HAMILL might look at it. Is it?”