Every now and then I get the weird urge to read Star Wars comics - I always loved the movies, even the ones all the cool kids sneered at and I do love comics, so it's seems like the obvious idea. But there's so fucking many of them I genuinely don't know where to start.
The only time I really properly followed Star Wars comics was for a few short, sweet months after Return of the Jedi had come out, and there's still a part of me that still thinks the best Star Wars comics come with Jo Duffy's words and Cynthia Martin's dreamy issues.
Marvel put out 107 issues in that initial run, and while there was a lull after it faded away, there have since been a deluge ever since. There are 625 series - not issues - in the comics.org database, with so many ongoings and limited series and collected editions of old comic strips.
Marvel got the franchise back just a few years ago, but have already pumped out hundreds of issues from dozens of titles, with multiple volumes of the bigger series. I know I've read a lot of them, but couldn't tell you much about what actually happens, other than Dr Aphra kicks arse. There's been a Bounty Hunters comic going on for, like, two years, and I didn't even know it existed.
On top of that, there's the vast troves of Dark Horse comics. After the restrained start with the Dark Empire series, they went absolutely apeshit with the Star Wars comics - because there was always money in Star Wars - for decades. There are entire new mythologies that now requite multiple omnibus editions to cover.
I've still got a couple of the battered issues that I clung feverishly to in the 1980s, and almost all of Cam Kennedy's Boba Fett comics, and that's all the Star Wars I really need.
Sometimes I get something like War of the Bounty Hunters and it seems fine, just fine, and I can't remember a thing about it. That might just be a sign of age, but it's also that there is so much Star Wars. I like Star Wars. A lot. But I never needed this much of it.
I keep forgetting I gotta get around to the last three episodes of that Boba Fett TV show because it was fine, just fine, but I ain't forgetting the way Walt Simonson and Tom Palmer drew X-Wings. A few good comics was always preferable to a forest of bantha piss.
I don't have much particular interest in Star Wars either but there's a couple of series I'd recommend. Darkfighter, written by Paul Chadwick, the story of Luke Skywalker's best mate is a great and reminds me of Alan Moore at his best and the Jabba the Hut stories written by Jim Woodring are also well worth reading if you like Frank (as is Woodring's similarly excellent Aliens: Labrinth comic, come to think of it)
ReplyDeleteThere ya go, I'd never even heard of the Chadwick and Woodring comics, and I love their stuff. They just got buried in mounds of Knights of the Old Republic books....
ReplyDelete