Star Wars #11Cover dated: May 1978
Issue title:
Star Search!Script: Archie Goodwin
Artwork: Carmine Infantino (breakdowns)/Terry Austin (finished art and inks)
Colours: Janice Cohen
Letters: Joe Rosen
Cover art: Gil Kane (pencils)/Tony DeZuniga (inks)
Overall rating: 4 out of 10
Plot summary: After leaving Aduba-3, Han Solo and Chewbacca are once more captured in their ship, the
Millennium Falcon, by Crimson Jack and his band of space-pirates. By chance, Princess Leia has also been captured by Crimson Jack, during her journey to the Drexel system to rescue Luke Skywalker. Jack is planning to ransom Leia to the Empire, but Han and the princess conspire to convince him of the existence of a horde of Rebel treasure in the Drexel system. Although he is suspicious of Solo, Jack is taken in by the ruse and agrees to head for the system.
Meanwhile, on the ocean planet of Drexel, Luke and his droids R2-D2 and C-3PO are fighting for their lives against a huge sea-dragon, while balanced precariously on the floating remains of their wrecked star-cruiser. Escaping from the beast in one of the sinking spaceship's escape pods, Luke spies a second sea-dragon with a rider and realises that the huge creatures are being controlled by a race of people.
Comments: So, this is the first issue of Marvel's
Star Wars comic by the new creative team of Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino. For those who might be unaware, by this point in his career Infantino was already regarded as a comics industry legend for his highly influential work on
The Flash,
Batman and, appropriately enough, the sci-fi superhero series
Adam Strange. However, Infantino's art style really isn't all that good a fit for the
Star Wars Universe, in my view. Even as a kid, I really didn't much like his artwork on the series – mostly because of its hard angular tenancies, but also because his renditions of
Star Wars tech never quite looked right. Take his depiction of the
Millennium Falcon in this issue, for instance...
On the one hand, it's easily recognisable as being the same spaceship from the movie. But the more you look at it, the more you spot problems with the detail (and perspective, in that first example) and you start to realise that, actually, it's a pretty inaccurate rendering of the craft. The same goes for Infantino's Star Destroyers as well. Oh, and while we're on the subject, the starships that Luke and Leia each left Yavin 4 in look entirely different under Infantino's pencil to how they did when Howard Chaykin and Tom Palmer drew them. Another problem I have with Infantino's art is that sometimes he puts his characters in slightly ungainly poses, which tend to take you out of the story when you encounter them.
However, let me just say that although Infantino's artwork looks very un-
Star Wars-y and is also kinda ugly looking, I've learned to really love it in spite of its faults or idiosyncrasies. I'm sure that there's a whole lot of nostalgia involved in my adult appreciation of artwork that I so disliked as a child, but for me (and many others of my generation, I'm sure), Infantino's artwork
was Star Wars between the years 1978 and 1980. What's more, I've also come to realise that his instincts for storytelling with sequential art were absolutely flawless. Throughout his run on the comic, it's always crystal clear exactly what is going on from one panel to the next. Also, let me just add that I appreciate Infantino showing us Hedji the spiner dying during a flashback in this issue (not seeing this scene in
Star Wars #10, was one of my big criticisms of that issue).
Terry Austin's contributions to the finished art and inking here are pretty good for the most part, although some of the cast's faces look a little weird or overly harsh at times. Austin also does a good job of toning down some of Infantino's more sharp-cornered tendencies, whereas Bob Wiacek (who would ink a number of future issues) seemed to emphasise it.
As for Archie Goodwin's plot and scripting, the characterisations of the core cast seem reasonably good and, as we will see as the series progresses, his stories are usually pretty good. His prose style is decidedly less romantic or poetic than Roy Thomas's too, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your own personal tastes. Speaking in
Back Issue magazine #9, Thomas would comment on Goodwin's writing for
Star Wars by saying, "I think Archie Goodwin had a much better feel for it than I did. He was more enthusiastic about it." Regardless of how enthusiastic he was, Goodwin wasn't actually expecting to write the comic for very long when he first came on board, as he explained in a 1982 interview for
Amazing Heroes magazine: "I was Editor-in-chief at the time, Roy was giving up the book and I knew we had to find somebody. What I thought was, 'Well, I'll write a few issues 'til we can settle on some other team.' I got Carmine [Infantino] to draw it and I got Terry Austin to ink it, and we just sort of kept doing it." In fact, Goodwin and Infantino would be the main creative team on the book for the next three years. In addition to writing the Marvel
Star Wars comic and the strip appearing in
Pizzazz magazine, Goodwin would also go on to pen some excellent adventures for the
Star Wars newspaper strip between 1980 and 1984.
Unfortunately, Goodwin's writing in issue #11 doesn't really showcase him at his best. For one thing, with the exception of a brief few pages showing Luke battling a sea-dragon, there's a paucity of action in this issue, with the majority of the story being taken up by Han and Leia conniving to get Crimson Jack to take them to the Drexel system. Also, Crimson Jack seems like a pretty two-dimensional character and so does his first mate Jolli, despite a nice little bit of character development in which we learn that she's a committed man hater. Still, Goodwin certainly writes Jack as a genuinely nasty threat (not easy, given that he's wearing what look like a pair of Speedos!). For example, the scene where Jack instructs his men to set their blasters for "slow burn", in order to slowly incinerate Han and Chewbacca where they stand, reveals him to be an utterly cruel individual.
We also get to see the first proper kiss between Han and Leia in this issue, even if it is just a trick to make Jack think that they are romantically involved (this kiss predates the one on board the
Millennium Falcon in
The Empire Strikes Back by almost three years). However, Leia is still clearly thinking about Luke Skywalker in a quasi-romantic fashion, which is a little uncomfortable, given what we now know about them being siblings.
There's also a slight continuity gaff here when Leia refuses to inform Jack of the location of the Rebel base and later states that the Rebel Alliance had "no way to be certain whether or not Darth Vader had succeeded in reporting our [Rebel base] position to Empire forces." It's totally illogical that the Rebels would imagine that they were safe on the fourth moon of Yavin as long as Darth Vader hadn't re-established contact with the Imperial forces when, clearly the Empire already knew where the Rebel base was because they sent the Death Star to blow it up in the
Star Wars movie!
Overall, this isn't an overwhelmingly auspicious start for the Goodwin/Infantino team. As previously noted, Infantino's artwork isn't really a very good fit for
Star Wars and the change from Chaykin and Palmer's art is really quite jarring. Also, this issue is a bit dull compared to the Aduba-3 storyline, and certainly compared to the movie adaptation that preceded that. To be fair though, this comic does spend most of its time setting up stuff that will come to fruition in later issues. Nonetheless, this is definitely the dullest issue of
Star Wars so far.
As a (possibly) interesting aside, according to Patrick Daniel O'Neill in
Starlog #120, by the time that issue #11 of Marvel's
Star Wars hit the stands, the U.S. comic was actually reprinting content that had already appeared in the UK's
Star Wars Weekly. This is because, being a weekly publication, the British
Star Wars comic was using up roughly two American issues of story every month. This problem was remedied by
Star Wars Weekly reprinting material from the
Pizzazz magazine strips and, as we shall see later, featuring original content not available to U.S. readers.
Continuity issues:
- Leia refuses to reveal the location of the Rebel base to Crimson Jack for fear that he will sell the information to the Empire, but, since the Death Star tried to destroy the Rebel base in the Star Wars film, the Imperials obviously already know where it is.
Favourite panel:
Favourite quote: "Put some feeling into it, your royalness...our lives are at stake." – Han Solo attempts to coerce Princess Leia into giving him a passionate kiss.
