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...

Someone - naturally - on Quora asks: Is the MCU based on anything? If you’re asking if the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is based on a single book or comic book story, the answer is  no.  As far as I know, there is no single source for the various films and television series produced by Marvel Studios over the past 11 years. The first film in the current MCU was 2008’s  Iron Man.  The latest entry in the series is  Avengers: Endgame.  In addition, ABC-TV (which is owned by Marvel Enterprises’ corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company) airs  Secret Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,  which is also integrated into the MCU. That having been said, the MCU is based primarily on the characters created by Marvel Comics and the various comic book series that shared a common fictional universe. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Spider-Man, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury, and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel are all characters created originally for Marvel Com...

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 cons...

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...

Cover art by Paul Renaud. (C) 2017 Marvel Comics Group and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On April 18, 2017, Marvel Comics published Star Wars: A New Hope: The 40 th Anniversary, a slim volume that collects 48 illustrations created for various Star Wars comic book titles ( Doctor Aphra, Poe Dameron, Darth Maul, and Yoda’s Secret War , just to name a few) in honor of the franchise’s 40 th year. Written by Jess Harrold and edited by Heather Antos, this 168-page book presents artwork by some of Marvel Comics’ best illustrators, including Juan Gimenez, Stuart Immonen, Adi Granov, Michael Walsh, Paul Renaud, Terry and Rachel Dotson, Mike Mayhew, Will Robson, Jordan Boyd, and Pepe Larraz. To celebrate the 40 th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, a galaxy of comic-book stars – from David Acuna to Chip Zdarsky – come together to present the legendary saga as you’ve never seen it before, across 48 stunning covers. The works of talents including Mark Brooks, Terry Dotson, Adi...

(C) 2016 Marvel Comics & Lucasfilm Ltd. Cover art by Phil Noto On December 6, 2016, Marvel Comics published Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a 136-page hardcover compilation of the six-issue comics adaptation of director J.J. Abrams' eponymous blockbuster space-fantasy film. Written by novelist, screenwriter, and game designer Chuck Wendig ( Star Wars: Aftermath ) and illustrated by Luke Ross and Frank Martin, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is based on the screenplay by J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt, as well as the characters and situations created by George Lucas. IT'S TRUE - ALL OF IT!  THE BIGGEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR JUMPS FROM THE BIG SCREEN TO THE COMIC-BOOK PAGE! It's been three decades since the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star and toppled the Galactic Empire...but now, on the remote planet of Jakku...there is a stirring in The Force. A young scavenger named Rey...a deserting Stormtrooper named Finn...an ace pilot named Poe...and a d...

(C) 2016 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. Cover art by Mike Mayhew On November 29, 2016, Marvel Comics published Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, a hardcover volume that collects all four issues of the comics adaptation of the eponymous space-fantasy film by writer-director George Lucas. These comics (and a similar trade paperback compilation) were originally published by Dark Horse Comics in 2005; Marvel, which regained the license to publish Star Wars content in 2014, has also reissued Dark Horse's other Prequel Era adaptations, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, as part of a collection that encompasses the entire Star Wars movie saga. Writer Christopher Cerasi (using the pen name "Miles Lane" in the original Dark Horse edition) and artist Doug Wheatley follow the story in Lucas's screenplay closely, even using the same title crawl text from the finished film. (For some reason, the "crawl" appears twice in this compilation. Fir...

(C) 2016 by Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Limited. Cover art by Mike Mayhew With the success of its 2015 hardcover re-mastered reissues of its classic Star Wars Trilogy comic adaptation, Marvel Comics decided to give the Prequel Trilogy a similar re-release the following year. Starting with the May 24 publication of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace , Marvel collected all four issues of Dark Horse Comics’ 2002 adaptation of Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the second installment of George Lucas’s “Tragedy of Darth Vader” saga. Written by Henry Gilroy – a screenwriter who has worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels – and drawn by Jan Duursema ( Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi ), the four-issue series tells the tale of a corrupt Republic’s gradual transformation into an authoritarian dictatorship, an ambitious Jedi apprentice’s stormy relationship with his Master, and a star-crossed romance that will ultimately affect the fate of the galaxy. ...

(C) 2016 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. Cover art by Mike Mayhew In May of 1999, Dark Horse Comics (which then had the license to publish Star Wars comics) released Issue No. 1 of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Written by Henry Gilroy and illustrated by Rodolfo Damaggio (with inks by the late Al Williamson, who had worked on the syndicated newspaper  Star Wars comic strip with Archie Goodwin, plus Marvel's adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi ). the first of four issues covered the first 30 minutes or so of George Lucas's 1999 space-fantasy film.  Later that year, Dark Horse collected all four issues in a trade paperback edition simply titled Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  Like most comic books based on the  Star Wars  movies, the four-issue series successfully taps into the spirit of The Phantom Menace, even though some of the events are moved around or compressed to fit the requirements of the printed...