I had planned to make a post of selections from inside but honestly it was pretty boring and mediocrely drawn without being funny bad so I skipped it.
The cover is by far the best and most baffling part of the comic. I’m convinced it’s a trace over of some horror genre cover. There are “giant stormtroopers” (they just look like normal stormtroopers but are called giant in dialog) who appear in the very last page in the comic to abduct Leia, but it’s much more boring looking than this and happens in space.
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Aren’t you a little tall for a stormtrooper?
I was going to say, either the perspective is screwed ir that’s a giant goddamned Storm Trooper!
Edit Digging into it, and you aren’t far off on it being a trace… #53 and #54 were from a John Carter Warlord of Mars book that had been cancelled.
Marvel ordered that the art be “re-purposed” into a Star Wars story.
OG Artist Walt Simonson explains it here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155903195075254&set=a.10150193606975254
That explains why most of the inside story is about some random space royalty nobody has ever heard of.
The link is walled, can someone copy paste the text or screenshot for those of us unfacebooked?
The Official Walter Simonson Page’s post
Aug 6, 2015
Star Wars 53 cover. Pen and India ink. 10 x 15. 1981.
I posted this cover because it represents something to me of the fun of comics back in the day. Maybe this sort of thing is still being done. No idea. But this issue of Star Wars began life as an issue of John Carter of Mars penciled by Carmine Infantino. :-) That title was canceled with an issue unpublished. And Marvel, in an effort to save a few bucks, mandated that the issue should be turned into a Star Wars story. It actually became two issues of Star Wars. I don’t remember if the John Carter story was two issues or if we merely stretched it out in order to convert the issue into an acceptable SW story.
The basic idea was to use as many of the JC pages as possible with as few changes as possible. Some extra pages had to be done and some panels altered to a greater or lesser degree to get everything to fit together. That was my job, along with the covers.
Chris Claremont wrote the issues and, I presume, wrote the original JC story. I’ve forgotten. I don’t know that it was the best way to make comics, but it was an interesting intellectual puzzle to try to solve in a readeable fashion. And it was the second time I got to do something like that. I’d helped Steven Grant convert an issue of Tarzan into a couple of Battlestar Galacticas a little earlier. It was fun, challenging, interesting and curious to do, whatever the final outcome.
I chose this cover because the issues had these giant stormtroopers in them, stormtroopers that I presume never appeared in any Star Wars stuff again. And we had giant stormtroopers in the issue in the first place because they were converted Tharks. ;-)
The physics of this cover make my mind warp.
