Review: 'Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 3'

The classic newspaper strips collected in IDW’s Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 2 hit their stride as writer Archie Goodwin got a complete handle on the films’ plot threads and the characters’ voices and recently-recruited artist Al Williamson mastered their likenesses. The third and final volume of this series continues those highs with more tales set between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. They find the rebels evacuating their base on Yavin 4 and finding a temporary new home on Hoth, and Obi Wan Kenobi making his first ghostly appearance to Luke. We also find out why General Dodonna never made it to Hoth.

One of the more ingenious decisions in creating these strips was to limit the action to the period between the second and third films even though almost half of these strips were published after the release of Return of the Jedi. This saved Goodwin from having to come up with a lot of crazy situations to keep the Rebels engaged after their defeat of the Empire or leaving Han Solo on ice for three years. Goodwin devised ways of introducing characters such as Admiral Ackbar (debuting in newspapers six months before his cinematic debut), Jabba the Hutt, Bib Fortuna, Boba Fett, and Dengar in ways that are respectful to what happened on screen (less respectful to Kenner, Dengar goes by his originally-intended name: Zuckuss). The final strip brings us right up to the initial events of The Empire Strikes Back…complete with a cornily on-the-nose declaration from Darth Vader.

Story-wise, the only downsides are the irritating tendency to sideline Princess Leia (Williamson’s ability to write her bickering with Han Solo is spot-on, though) and the superfluousness of the Sunday strips, which tend to offer nothing but redundant exposition. The Sundays’ full-color art is nice, though, and it looks particularly grand on IDW’s authentically non-digitized pages. Once again we get a lovely hardcover presentation with an informative, extended introduction by Rich Handley and a neat ribbon bookmark. Best of all are the stories and art, which may amount to the finest non-canon Star Wars stories of all.

Review: 'Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978'

DC comics was suffering in the late seventies. Some blamed it on the harsh winter of ’78, a period of incessant blizzards that prevented a lot of kids from visiting the newsstand. Some blamed it on DC’s publisher, Jenette Kahn, whose failed scheme to reinvigorate her company involved swelling page counts, cover prices, and titles. Keith Dallas and John Wells accuse unsympathetic distributors in the epilogue of their new book Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. However, they mostly stay out of the way, allowing quotations from reams of old articles and interviews to tell the story of a topsy-turvy period in comic history.

What we learn is that DC was not the only company in over its head. Golden-boy Marvel was too, only to be rescued from the abyss when it agreed to publish spin offs of a weird new sci-fi movie by the kid who’d made American Graffitti. However, the main focus is on DC, particularly Kahn’s planned “Explosion” that was to see 22 new titles hit the stands in a new longer format only to be cancelled at the last minute. The titles that were to be included in this infamous Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, where those titles ended up, and the reasons for that cancellation are major points of discussion.

There is also a lot of discussion of pricing and the business-side of comics publishing in this book, but all of those facts and figures are the least interesting thing about Comic Book Implosion. What’s more intriguing are the soap-opera drama, the bizarre and desperate ideas (an African-American superhero named Black Bomber whose secret identity is a white racist? Yow.), and the stray triumphs that emerged amidst the turbulence. We see the successful revival of the Teen Titans, the births of Black Lightning and Firestorm, the mania surrounding Superman: The Movie and its handsome star, and the ballyhooed bout between the Man of Steel and Muhammad Ali. And despite the initial failure of Kahn’s planned Explosion, she did a lot of good for DC, such as her cultivation of younger talent and new titles, her abolishment of lazy reprints, and her implementation of profit sharing.

Although Dallas and Wells did not conduct any new interviews for Comic Book Implosion, they culled their quotes from such a wide swath of sources, and from such an interesting line up of industry folk (including Kahn, Larry Hama, Neil Adams, Carmine Infantino, Archie Goodwin, James Warren, Muhammad Ali himself, etc.), that it doesn’t matter much. Yes, it makes for messy storytelling, but that’s basically the case with all oral histories. And Dallas and Wells’s refusal to editorialize allows us readers to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, who is lying and who is telling the truth, which makes for more involving reading. The cavalcade of photos and illustrations— which includes an 8-page, full-color spread—makes it fun.

Review: 'Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 2'

Russ Manning had been illustrating the Star Wars comic strip since it started running in newspapers in 1979, but terminal health issues forced him out of the job in mid-1980. After a seven-month period in which Alfredo Alcala took over, the project officially fell onto Al Williamson’s drafting table. With all due respect to Manning, who’d done a more than capable job, Williamson was the best person for the job. While Manning’s artwork was less cartoony than the work illustrators such as Howard Chaykin and Carmine Infantino had been doing in Marvel’s comic books, Manning didn’t make much effort to really capture the likenesses of the likes of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford or the costumes of Darth Vader and Chewbacca. When Williamson delivered an adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back for Marvel, comic book readers received the closest experience to watching the movie at home in the days before its VHS release. With an illustrious background that included work on E.C.’s sci-fi titles and Flash Gordon, Williamson was not surprisingly George Lucas’s first choice for the job even before Manning got it.