Archie Goodwin (1937–1998)

I bought all of these comics when they came out originally. As a kid I lived for every new Star Wars story. Rereading them made me chuckle. Their was no canon at the time and the Marvel writers just went hog wild. If you have a problem with Jar Jar you are going to love Jax. This was the only way to get extra Star Wars while you waited for the movie. They sold incredibly well at the time.

Some of the stories are great but others don't hold up well. I would have given them a 5 as a kid now they are more like a 3.5. A great walk down memory lane.… (mere)

I received this as a gift in the fall of 1980, a few months after seeing the newly released movie in theatres. This was significant in two respects, one being my impressionable age (7) and the other being that this predated the ability to re-watch movies at home, in any format. Thanks to this comic I could revisit the most spectacular movie I'd ever seen when I had no other means of doing so.

This is not strictly a scene-for-scene, line-by-line recreation of what you know. Like most adaptations that are composed at the same time as the film is in post-production, it has elements from earlier scripts and features scenes that were later cut, while missing others that were later added. It does not open with a star destroyer, and it includes the wampa attack on the rebel base. Darth Vader requests his ship as he is leaving Cloud City, which we didn't see him do on screen until the 1997 special edition.

Objects are not always accurately scaled (Yoda and the Executor, especially), and the shading gives an odd look to some scenes; as a prisoner of Cloud City, Han Solo looks ready for the discotheque. These are minor quibbles to me. I loved, and still love, every frame of my treasured copy and the fuel this provided to my young imagination. The original film trilogy is a significant memory for me and ESB most of all, in part because of this.… (mere)