Q&As About 'Star Wars': Is 'Star Wars' Based on a Comic Book?

© 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp. 

Recently, someone asked this question on Quora:

Is Star Wars based on a comic book?

I, of course, replied:

What? Holy Mother of Skywalker, of course not.

Star Wars was not based on an eponymous pre-existing literary work that a 30-something George Lucas happened to come across at a used book store whilst trying to come up with a follow-up film to his 1973 hit American Grafitti.

Rather, Star Wars as we know and love it (?) was created by Lucas himself, starting in 1971 with some early (and bizarre) story ideas for a space-fantasy film that would be the antithesis to his dystopian (and unsuccessful) sci-fi film THX-1138, which his friend Francis Ford Coppola produced and Warner Bros. released that same year.

Considering how large a shadow Star Wars casts upon modern pop culture over 40 years after the original movie premiered on May 25, 1977, it’s hard to believe that Lucas’s original plan to make a fun, escapist, tongue-in-cheek space fantasy for young people did not include, well, creating his own saga.

No, dear readers, what George Lucas really had in mind was to bring Alex Raymond’s 1930s comic strip Flash Gordon to the big screen, keeping most of its fantastical concepts (such as one-environment worlds), cleft-chin heroes with ray guns and fast quips, and gorgeous women in various roles that ranged from plucky damsels who would be in distress but be able to fend for themselves to evil (but scantily clad) and seductive villains.

Lucas, after all, was born in 1944, and whilst he was growing up in Modesto, California in the 1950s and early 1960s, he watched the old, campy, and cheaply-made Saturday matinee Flash Gordon serials that were shown in theaters before he was born and were being revived on TV for the Baby Boom generation to enjoy. Lucas figured that if he could get the rights to remake Flash Gordon with the same “thrill-a-minute” cliffhanger vibe but with 2001: A Space Odyssey-like special effects, contemporary viewers (i.e. 1970s-era youths) would enjoy them more than the dystopian sci-fi fare (Planet of the Apes, Death Race 2000, and Lucas’s own THX-1138) that the big studios were putting out at the time.

To make a long and complex story short, Lucas failed to secure the rights to Flash Gordon. Dino De Laurentiis had acquired them sometime in the 1950s, and Lucas (who was still a relative newcomer in 1971) was just one of several directors who wanted to bring Alex Raymond’s comic strip to life once again; Federico Fellini had tried to do the same, but De Laurentiis decided that he wanted to produce his own Flash Gordon epic, which he eventually did by hiring Mike Hodges to direct.

(Ironically, Flash Gordon was released by Universal Pictures, one of the studios that rejected Lucas’s pitch for Star Wars back in 1973, even though American Graffiti was a big hit for the studio that year. Unfortunately for studio head Ned Tanen, Flash Gordon was only a big hit in England but flopped in the U.S. and other markets.)

Still determined to make a space fantasy film for all ages, but especially for kids and teens, Lucas spent the next three years working on a project that underwent many changes and sported various titles, including The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller and even hokier variations, until he finally settled on the now familiar two-word title, Star Wars.

Having thus explained that Star Wars is not based on a comic book by that name, what is the movie based on, anyway?

Basically, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are still Star Wars’ most basic inspirations. The title crawl at the beginning of all the Skywalker Saga Episodes were tips of the hat to those old action-adventure serials. So is the pacing and cliffhanger structure.

Lucas also borrows heavily from:

• Akira Kurosawa’s “Spaghetti Easterns” that feature samurai, notably The Hidden Fortress
• Westerns, especially John Ford’s The Searchers
• World War II movies with “special mission” storylines, most of them involving bombers, aerial combat, and difficult-to-hit targets, especially The Dam Busters and 633 Squadron, although other films (Air Force, Battle of Britain) were used to determine the shot length and pacing for the Death Star battle
• The Magnificent Seven, which itself was a remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai
• Frank Herbert’s Dune
• Gangster films
• Errol Flynn films of the 1930s and ‘40s, especially Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood
• Various myths and legends from different parts of the world that share universal themes, per Lucas’s studies with Joseph Campbell
• Other science fiction and fantasy works

Now, it is true that Del Rey Books, an imprint of Ballantine Books, did publish Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker in November of 1976, almost six months before the movie premiered. It was credited to none other than George Lucas, a credit that still appears on re-issues of the book to this very day.

However, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker was not written by Lucas, a guy who loves to tell visual stories but is uncomfortable with the writing process. The real author of the novelization (which is based on one version of Star Wars’ fourth revised screenplay draft) is Alan Dean Foster, a well-known science fiction writer hired by Lucas and Lucasfilm’s VP for media relations, Charles Lippincott, to ghostwrite the book.

In addition, Marvel Comics, which at the time was under financial difficulties, took a huge chance when the late, great Stan Lee assigned writer-editor Roy Thomas to do a six-issue adaptation of the as-of-yet unreleased film. Thomas then got an interview with Lucas, who explained the characters and situations to the young Marvel Comics writer and graciously allowed him to use the same version of the script Foster had used to base the novel on. Marvel was also granted access to reference photos (very few, but still) and other material by Lucasfilm.

Marvel Comics' Star Wars #1, which hit newsstands on April 12, 1977. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and Marvel Comics Group

The upshot of all this is that most of the production of Marvel's six-issue series occurred in late 1976 and early 1977, so the publisher was able to put Issue #1 on newsstands and comic book shelves on April 12, 1977…more than a month before Star Wars hit theaters for the first time.