A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Marvel Special Edition #3 Featuring Star Wars  collected issues 1-6 of the official Star Wars comics adaptation. Cover art by Ernie Chan. © 1977 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Is Star Wars part of the Marvel Universe? No. The  Star Wars  franchise (including films, animated and live-action TV series, and novels) properly belongs to Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company founded in 1971 by George Lucas, who ran it until October 2012. That’s when he sold Lucasfilm and all of its intellectual property to The Walt Disney Company for $2.2 billion in cash and $1.855 billion in stock. Marvel Comics, which itself is now also owned by The Walt Disney Company, has had a long relationship with  Star Wars,  starting as early as 1976. Back then, the comics publisher was one of the first companies to show interest in Lucas’s space-fantasy film set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Marvel artist Howard Chaykin created the very first  Star Wars  teaser poster

The November 1977 issue of Star Wars Poster Monthly revealed - vaguely - how Vader became a cyborg. © 1977 Paradise Press and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation On Quora, someone asks: Prior to  Star Wars: Episode III  was there ever a canonical explanation for the appearance of Darth Vader? My reply: As early as late 1977, George Lucas allowed Lucasfilm, through the official  Star Wars Poster Monthly  magazine, to reveal tantalizing bits of the Dark Lord of the Sith’s backstory. In an article titled  Darth Vader Lives,  (Issue #2. November 1977) author John May based his work on some of the information that had been already published about Vader in publicity materials (movie lobby cards, collectors’ movie programs, and the photo inserts in the  Star Wars  novelization), plus a Rolling Stone magazine interview with George Lucas. Readers were told that Vader had trained as a Jedi Knight under Obi-Wan Kenobi’s tutelage but had turned to the dark side of the Force, betra