Comics – The Marvel Star Wars!

Last week I naturally succumbed to the hoopla and bought the first issue of Marvel Comics’ new “Star Wars” comic book (my comics-related posts here on Stevereads really do need to be closer to Wednesday – which, for all you non-virgins out there, is New Comics Day here in Boston – and I’ll work on that, but in the meantime), written by Jason Aaron and drawn by John Cassaday. And as I went to the register paid my $15 (or whatever a single issue of a comic book costs these days) to the rail-thin four-pack-a-day hipster with the abdomen-length unwashed beard, I couldn’t help but think back fondly to 1977 – fondly not just because that rancid, pretentious, borderline-illiterate tobacco addict hipster undergraduate hadn’t yet been born, but also because that was when I encountered the first Marvel Comics adaptation of Star Wars and liked it very much.

Way back then, I bought that first issue because it was drawn by the great, insane Howard Chaykin (although I also got quite a kick out of the little upper-left-corner issue logo, which showed a picture of heroic Luke Skywalker drawn by John Romita, Sr.)(what can I say? It’s the little things in life), and that was good enough for me even though I knew next to nothing about the actual contents (and even though those first few issues had far too much creeping Carmine Infantino touches for my liking).

Of course, everything has changed here in 2015. In the intervening quarter-century, Star Wars has gone from one fairly enjoyable movie to a franchise of galactic proportions and a cultural reach exceeding that of most religions – complete with a Second Coming in the form of the upcoming new movie in which, for the first time, the whole magilla’s pinch-voiced megalomaniacal creator, George Lucas, has no say.

In fact, Star Wars has now achieved such an absurdly revered status that it’s considered anathema to point out the obvious: that it largely stinks. The reason it stinks isn’t hard to figure out: this shoddy, half-baked little concept is exactly the sort of thing that should have been road-tested as a weekly network TV show long before it ever reached the big screen. Not only would that have served to spotlight its continuity weaknesses (and they are legion) and iron out some of them, but it would also have allowed the strengths of Lucas’s original concepts (few though they are) to be fleshed out by some hired writers of actual talent. This is the sort of piecemeal genesis that worked for Star Trek and – much later and much more critically successfully – for Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars didn’t get it.

As a result, we have a protracted, mostly embarrassing mess that can’t ever be identified as such, for the simple reason that it constitutes the personal religion of the people who would otherwise do the identifying. Those people will tell you – with little to no provocation – that the three ‘prequel’ movies pinch-voiced megalomaniacal George Lucas made in the early 2000s were terrible, that they were travesties, that they were abominations. But the bedrock article of faith implied in their condemnations of the second trilogy of movies is that the first trilogy of movies was great. Oh sure, they might queasily half-joke about the Ewoks, but by and large, they’ll rank the movie now called “A New Hope,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “The Return of the Jedi” as milestones not just in cinema but in their own lives.

I once had one of these acolytes look me straight in the face and tell me in all seriousness that “The Empire Strikes Back” was the single greatest science fiction movie ever made. And when I burst out laughing, his face became taut and palely serious.

The original movie – Star Wars to me, A New Hope to the faithful – has a small handful of genuinely good bits. Lightsabers. “That’s no moon. It’s a space station.” The trash compactor scene. Of course, Darth Vader – and that’s it. The rest is an almost-hopeless mish-mash of cliches, bad acting, and bad writing, and no matter what vantage point you look at it all from, no matter how close or distant your focus, none of it makes any sense. But at least, unlike the following five movies, it was enjoyable – and the folks at Marvel must realize that on some level, because this first issue of their new comics series is set immediately in and around the ending of that first movie.

So the Empire is still fully in control of things. Darth Vader is still a fantastic villain rather than anybody’s father, padawan, lover, or crybaby. Han Solo and Princess Leia are still verbal sparring partners rather than sappy lovers. Our scrappy band of heroes is still very much outgunned and outnumbered – in other words, they’re still rebels, facing a vast and seemingly unbeatable tyranny.

That’s very promising material for lots of comic book adventures, and this first issue gives me hope – one might even say a new hope – for the issues to follow. Jason Aaron does a pretty good job capturing the admittedly skeletal “characters” of that first movie, and although John Cassaday’s artwork is too often hampered by the need to make his characters look like the actors who portrayed them 30 years ago (it’s surprising how few talented comic book artists are also talented caricaturists, but there you have it), his straightforward sense of visual excitement never abandons him – it’s easily possible to ‘read’ this issue without looking at the words at all and still get everything Aaron means to convey.

I won’t be hurrying to see the new “Star Wars” movie in the theaters; its brainless director has already savaged the sci-fi franchise I actually care about, so I have no desire to watch the also-rans get pillaged. But after reading and re-reading this first Marvel Star Wars issue a couple of times, I must admit: it’s nice to see these characters again in the setting that suits them best. I’ll stick around for a few issues.