When Marvel reclaims the “Star Wars” license from Dark Horse next year, one thing is certain: It’ll start off with better original stories than the first time it had the license. As I noted in my review of the regular Marvel series, Roy Thomas’ early issues featuring Han and Chewie are some of the roughest “Star Wars” yarns out there, but that wasn’t all Thomas was putting out at the time: His Luke-and-Leia adventure in Marvel’s Pizzazz magazine started the same month, in October 1977.
Luckily, just as Marvel’s proper “Star Wars” title would gradually improve, so did Marvel’s Pizzazz and Marvel U.K. original stories, which is why they are worth tracking down. And it’s easier than ever, as you can simply pick up Dark Horse’s 2013 “Wild Space Volume 1” omnibus. But the ride doesn’t start smoothly in the first Pizzazz arc, “The Keeper’s World.” Luke and Leia aim to travel from Yavin IV to another Rebel base to make contact, but they crash land on a planet occupied by what seem to be four X-Men and the sentient ship from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Thomas – and even Archie Goodwin, who takes over “The Keeper’s World” halfway – don’t yet have a firm grip on the cadences or tech of “Star Wars.” Bizarre Leia dialogue: “Luke! Hit the cosmic overdrive – now!” Then an Imperial commander vows to capture the Rebels and “take them back to his majesty – the galactic emperor!” Maybe it is just a figure of speech, but if he is being literal, it’s insane to think that the emperor would be bothered with little details like a ship without Imperial markings. It’d be like hauling someone with expired license plates before the president. Later, an entire crew of Imperials escapes the planet in a single TIE fighter, which the writers call simply call an “Empire ship” at this point. Along these same lines, later in the proper Marvel run, there’s a Y-wing with an interior as vast as the Millennium Falcon.
“The Kingdom of Ice” (which started in Pizzazz, finished in Marvel U.K. and later had the U.K. portion reprinted in Marvel Illustrated Book 1, a.k.a. “Four New Adventures in Full Color!”) continues Luke and Leia’s mission to contact the other Rebel base on a snow planet – not Hoth, but rather Akuria Two. Thanks to the steadier hand of Goodwin, who introduces the phrase “Star Warriors” here just as he did in the proper series, it’s better than “Keeper’s World,” but the writer does his best Marvel U.K. work in the three other stories in Marvel Illustrated Book 1.
“Way of the Wookiee!” tells the story where Han and Chewie have to dump Jabba’s load of spice. Unfortunately, as good as A.C. Crispin’s “Han Solo Trilogy” is when it comes to continuity, she told an alternate spice-dumping tale in “Rebel Dawn.” I suppose both stories could have happened, but if Han’s dumping that much of Jabba’s spice all over the space lanes, I suddenly sympathize with the Hutt using Solo as a wall decoration.
“The Day After the Death Star!” is noteworthy for Leia giving Chewbacca his medal in the informal celebration following the proper ceremony at the end of “A New Hope.” Obviously, the producers of the “MTV Movie Awards” were not readers of obscure “Star Wars” comics, as they commissioned Carrie Fisher to award Chewie yet another medal in 1997. Also in this story, Luke crams Artoo into his X-wing cockpit, as the astromech socket hadn’t yet been repaired, continuing the trend of Marvel writers overestimating the size of cockpit interiors.
“The Weapons Master!” is a good commentary on the hypocrisy of Alderaan’s no-weapons policy. We learn how Leia learned to shoot: Her dad, Bail Organa, assigns his old Clone Wars buddy Giles Durane to train Leia, a rookie senator at the time, for the purposes of self-defense. (Too bad Durane didn’t pop up in a “Clone Wars” episode.) Presumably, this training took place off Alderaan, as Bail wouldn’t break his own planet’s laws, but who knows? The idea of a planet that doesn’t have any weapons in a dangerous galaxy is nonsensical on many levels, and there’s never been a “Star Wars” story that adequately explains how it works. Do musclebound criminals serve their terms on the honor system? Or does the Alderaan police force send out a dozen men to wrestle the bigger bad guys and drag them back to a cell? Or maybe when we hear that “Alderaan has no weapons,” it really means that the citizenry has no weapons, but the police do.
Chris Claremont, who wrote four issues in the regular Marvel series, saved his most epic yarn for the Marvel U.K. arc “World of Fire,” which was reprinted as Marvel Illustrated Book 2. Comprising 70 comic-book pages (the equivalent of about three standard issues), it’s a horror movie plot featuring our Star Warriors, plus supporting Rebel character Mici, and a handful of Imperials with whom Luke and Leia form a truce as they explore the planet Alashan.
Mici – a character never heard from before – has “horror movie victim” written all over her, so perhaps the biggest surprise in the yarn is that she survives. Like so many supporting Rebels in the 1970s-80s comics, though, she is never heard from again. Maybe she’s hanging out somewhere with Tanith Shire, Silver Fyre, Raskar and Gemmer. Another oddity is when Luke uses his lightsaber to delicately cauterize Mici’s wounds. “It’s the hardest thing Luke has ever done” – boy, I’ll say!
The revelation of the monster, a guardian of an ancient underground city, is amusing: Claremont calls it “a living nightmare that defies description,” but as drawn by Carmine Infantino and Gene Day, it looks like the Night Beast from the Goodwin/Williamson newspaper strips combined with H.R. Giger-esque “Alien” limbs. Come to think of it, the Night Beast was also protecting a long-lost civilization. In fairness, “World of Fire” came out before the Night Beast yarn, but the build-up to a rather generic monster is funny. Nonetheless, “World of Fire” is a fairly tasty horror yarn, and the earliest blatant use of that genre’s tropes to tell a “Star Wars” story.