Book Review: 'The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of The Empire Strikes Back'

Cover art by Marvel Comics artist Bob Larkin. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

In May of 1980, a few weeks before 20th Century Fox released Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in theaters, Marvel's official comics adaptation hit the shelves at bookstores, newsstands and comic book shops in the U.S. and Canada. There were various iterations of writer Archie Goodwin and artists Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon's take on the story written by George Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan, including five monthly issues (Star Wars #39-44, labeled as Star Wars but featuring a  cover "blurb" featuring the logo for The Empire Strikes Back), a large-format "Treasury" edition, and The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back, which was the size of a mass-market paperback (4 1/8" X 7" size) and featured cover art by Bob Larkin.

Of all these, The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back was the first to reach consumers. Part of the reason that when Williamson and Garzon started drawing the artwork for Goodwin's script, Lucasfilm was keeping a tight lid on certain plot points and even the look of several of the characters in The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas's production company, as personified by Lucasfilm's liaison with Marvel, Diana Attias, provided over 10,000 still photographs and production paintings by Ralph McQuarrie to help Goodwin and his team of graphic artists adapt the film to the printed page. However, to prevent "leaks" about the film's key new player, Yoda, Attias didn't give Williamson and Garzon reference pictures of the final puppet used in the film. Instead, Marvel only had the taller, scrawnier (and bluish) Yoda envisioned by McQuarrie in several of the paintings set on Dagobah.

Yoda, as seen in The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back, is based on Ralph McQuarrie's original design. Note the long white hair and thin frame of the Jedi Master. Art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

As we know, though, character and costume designs often change during the production process of a film, especially one like The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda's look changed between 1978 (when McQuarrie and Stuart Freeborn first designed him) and 1979 (when filming took place). Lucasfilm wanted to keep the look under wraps as long as possible, so no photos were sent out to the various licensees till almost the last minute.

Lucasfilm sent reference photos of Yoda to Marvel after Garzon and Williamson turned in their artwork for Star Wars #41 and other issues with Yoda, too late to make the deadline for The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back, but just in the nick of time for other versions of the comics adaptation.  

Art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon. © 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

The upshot of all that is that by the time Lucasfilm provided Marvel with photos of the "real" Yoda, the first edition of the comics adaptation (The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back) on the printing schedule had already been finished. There was no time to correct the artwork on the paperback version, so The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back was published with the McQuarrie-designed Yoda; all of the other Marvel Comics editions of The Empire Strikes Back (including the 2015 remastered version) feature the movie version of everyone's favorite Jedi Master.

The smaller size of the paperback also made it necessary to adjust the panels, as the original layout was designed for the standard-sized comic book (10 and 1/8 in. X 6 and 5/8 in.) format and larger.

The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back is 221 pages long and collects the following issues of Marvel Comics Star Wars:

• Star Wars 39: The Empire Strikes Back: Beginning
• Star Wars 40: The Empire Strikes Back: Battleground Hoth
• Star Wars 41: The Empire Strikes Back: Imperial Pursuit
• Star Wars 42: The Empire Strikes Back: To Be a Jedi
• Star Wars 43: The Empire Strikes Back: Betrayal at Bespin
• Star Wars 44: The Empire Strikes Back: Duel a Dark Lord 

My Take

I bought The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back almost as soon as it hit bookstores in advance of Empire's premiere. I had already bought the novelization by Donald F. Glut and the RSO 2-LP original soundtrack album in April; in those pre-Disney years, Lucasfilm whetted fans' appetite for new Star Wars films by releasing some of the tie-in media a month or so before the film hit theaters, a marketing technique that the company used on and off from 1980 to 2008, except for Return of the Jedi. (Disney-owned Lucasfilm, which exists in the era of the Internet, tends to release novelizations and comics adaptations after a film's release; Mur Laffery's novelization of Solo: A Star Wars Story was published in September 2018, four months after Ron Howard's movie premiered.)

Due to the exigencies of the comics medium, the version of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back follows the basic plot of George Lucas's story and the Brackett-Kasdan script. It's not a slavish, shot-by-shot, line-by-line adaptation; as Goodwin writes in his behind-the-scenes essay, each of the adaptation's five issues has a finite number of pages (22 in average) in which he and the artists had to distill the essence of a motion picture and translate it to the printed page.

As a result of this, as well as Lucasfilm's requests that Marvel not show the Wampa, the Emperor's hologram, or the giant space slug that almost eats the Millennium Falcon in that asteroid near Hoth,

The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back is, by necessity, a condensed version of the movie. There's enough of the story in it to satisfy fans, but it leaves quite a bit out, especially some of the comedic exchanges between C-3PO and R2-D2. 

It goes without saying as well that Goodwin's script for the comics adaptation was based on a draft of the screenplay that was replaced by a later version during principal photography. As a result, the "title crawl" that opens The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back is different from the one in the film. In addition, some of the dialog is different, and there are scenes in The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back that are not in Irvin Kershner's now-classic movie.

Since 1997, I've added two different versions of the Goodwin-Williamson-Garzon Empire adaptation: Dark Horse Comics' 1997 reissue that was released in tandem with The Special Edition theatrical re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy. And in 2015 I bought Marvel Comics hardcover edition with the "remastered" coloring by "Sotocolor." I like all three, but I'm somewhat fonder of The Marvel Comics Illustrated Edition of The Empire Strikes Back. It was the first edition that I laid my eyes on, and because of its role in Marvel Comics - and Star Wars - history.