“The Star Wars” J.W. Rinzler, based on the original rough-cut screenplay by George Lucas; art by Mike Mayhew. (6 out of 10 stars) Trade paperback, Dark Horse Comics, 2014. $19.99
This is a project I had heard about in 2013, but didn’t have the time to keep up with. An eight-issue comic book miniseries that takes George Lucas’ original rough-draft screenplay for “Star Wars,” and adapts them, using Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art as the starting point for the visuals. The “secret origins” of Star Wars have always intrigued me; the what-ifs, the larger role that Biggs had on Tatooine, the pieces that made it into the movie versus those that didn’t. I’ve read “Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays,” and figured I knew what to expect here. I was wrong. Instead of a slightly different version of my favorite universe, we got something a lot messier.
This draft version of Lucas’ screenplay is from 1974 (the first movie was released in 1977), and it’s clear that he did a lot of cutting to fit this sprawling jumble into a series of movies instead of one big one. Elements from the original trilogy show up in this story, as well as a few places and names that we didn’t end up seeing until the prequel trilogy. I’ll try to sum up the plot here:
Annikin Starkiller is the son of a former Jedi. They leave their homeworld of Utapau and head for Aquilae, one of the few star systems free of a Galactic Empire. Luke Skywalker is an older man who becomes the teacher of Annikin. Princess Leia is one of the leaders of Aquliae, and her world is targeted by the Empire so they can get their cloning technology. Aquilae launches an attack on the Empire’s space fortress, and C-3PO and R2-D2 land an escape pod on Leia’s planet. . Annikin and Luke rescue Leia from an attack on her capital, and meet up with Han Solo, a tall reptilian dude who hunts Wookiees in his spare time. Uhhh they steal starships, there’s an asteroid field, there’s a Sith Lord who’s not Darth Vader, but another one who is Darth Vader, but you almost never see him, and they go undercover as stormtroopers, and Luke leads a fleet of Wookiees to attack the and destroy the space fortress, because oh yeah, they were on the wookiee homeworld for a while…it’s all just too much.
Han Solo, a tall reptilian dude who hunts Wookiees in his spare time
I love Star Wars. I always have. It’s the first movie I saw in the theaters. I know the names and characters better than I know my own family members (and like many of them more). But this is a mess.
At the very least, it’s a beautiful mess, thanks to Mike Mayhew’s art. He takes Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art (which I love with a love I normally reserve for LEGO) and combines it with the aesthetic of the first Star Wars movie and turns it into a familiar universe with a few twists. Stormtroopers and other non-Jedi, non-Sith have lightsabers, for example. C-3PO has a distinctly female look based on Maria from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The Imperial spaceships and space fortress are even shinier and smoother than the version we recognize, Utapau is dirtier and more rundown than Tatooine. Aquilae is more art deco, more Naboo-like than anything we see in the original trilogy; I’m not sure if that’s Mayhew’s own interpretation or something that McQuarrie and Lucas had originally intended.
It’s a beautiful mess
J.W. Rinzler, a Jedi of the Lucasfilm archives himself, did a masterful job of adapting that rough screenplay into a comic book. The awkward truth is that the screenplay was too big, too messy to begin with. There’s a reason half of the characters and subplots and planets and action sequences fell out of “A New Hope,” and were folded back into the two trilogies later. Imagine a draft of “Lord of the Rings” where J.R.R. Tolkien puts everything that happens in the three books into a single screenplay; it’s about like that. You’re introduced to characters at a confusing rate, and knowing the existing characters is actually a hindrance, because the name you know is no longer the person you know.
This is a fascinating project. If you’re a die-hard Star Wars fan, it’s something to look at someday. But it’s more a curiosity–an interesting experiment–than something that you need to track down. If nothing else, it will make you appreciate the final product that was released in 1977, and thank the Maker that George Lucas figured out how to edit this mess into something filmable. I’m giving this a rating of 6 out of 10 as a big ol’ Star Wars nerd…probably less if you’re a more casual fan.