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...

Cover art by Ernie Chan. (C) 1978 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corp.  Photo Credit: Wookieepedia I was 15 years old and still getting used to living in a new townhouse in a still-new development called East Wind Lake Village in unincorporated Dade County when I first saw a copy of Marvel Comics' Marvel Special Edition #3: Featuring Star Wars. Even 40 years later, I can recall with startling clarity walking into the neighborhood's Top Banana - a convenience store owned and operated by Miami-based Farm Stores, a company famous for its drive-thru convenience stores. This particular Top Banana was only a few blocks away from the new townhouse, and every so often Mom would ask me to walk there to buy a gallon of milk or a pint of Farm Stores ice cream. Like many convenience stores, the Top Banana at the Blue Grotto shopping plaza had a large magazine display stand next to the cashier station, and in addition to the usual mix of issues of Time, People, TV Guide, and...