I'm sure I'm about to get into trouble again but I have to disagree. Williamson's depiction of the faces and objects of Star Wars is certainly more accurate (Infantino never met a Star Destroyers he couldn't give the wrong number of engines too), but at least in the Empire adaptation - I've not read the other Star Wars stuff he did - there is a lifeless grimness to proceedings. The Empire Strikes Back is a dark film but characters still grin and smirk. Everyone in the comic seems to have the same look of stoic determination.

Infantino's work has its valleys and peaks but there is a sense of action, humour and life flowing through them that do a better job of capturing the spirit, at least of the first film.

BTW, I recently stumbled upon this thread and am excited to join in!

Good catch! You're absolutely right. In the month cover dated December 1983, Star Wars #78, Return of the Jedi #3 and Star Wars Annual #3 were all on the shelves together.




Glad to have you join us, tex1272. Please feel free to discuss any of the reviews that I've posted so far, no matter how long ago I might've originally discussed them. And if you're into vintage comic books generally, this forum is a very friendly, welcoming place. So please do have a look around and get stuck in to some discussions.

Star Wars #40
Cover dated: October 1980
Issue title: Battleground Hoth!
Script: Archie Goodwin
Artwork: Al Williamson (pencils & inks)/Carlos Garzon (pencils & inks)/Rick Veitch (pencils - uncredited)
Colours: Glynis Wein
Letters: Rick Veitch
Cover art: Al Williamson (pencils & inks)/Carlos Garzon (pencils & inks)
Overall rating: 10 out of 10




Plot summary: While Luke Skywalker recovers in the Rebel medical centre from his encounter with a Wampa, he reveals to Princess Leia that he must leave and travel to the Dagobah system to locate the mysterious Jedi Master, Yoda. Leia is upset at this news and, after an angry exchange with Han Solo, she passionately kisses Luke in an attempt to make Han jealous.

Meanwhile, the Imperial fleet, led by Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer, Executor, comes out of lightspeed in the Hoth system. However, Admiral Ozzel has come out of hyperspace too close to the planet where the Rebels are located, thus alerting them to the Imperial's presence. Vader punishes Ozzel by using the Force to choke the Admiral to death, quickly promoting Captain Piett as his replacement. The Imperials then deploy gigantic, armoured AT-AT walkers to the planet's surface, under the command of General Veers.

Back on Hoth, Luke Skywalker leads Rogue Squadron against the advancing walkers, in support of Rebel ground troops, as the evacuation of the Rebel base begins. Coming under heavy fire and realising that their on-board blasters are ineffective against the AT-AT's thick armour, Rogue Squadron fly their snowspeeders around the walkers' legs, using harpoons and tow cables to trip them up and destroy them. During the battle, Luke's snowspeeder is hit and crashes into the snowy terrain, as an advancing walker bears down on his craft, ready to crush it with its feet.


Comments: This is the best issue of Marvel's Star Wars comic published so far, in my opinion. Last issue was fantastic, but this second instalment of the comic adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back somehow manages to up the ante even further. Archie Goodwin's scripting is superb, as he masterfully adapts Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay to the comic book page and, just like last issue, Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon's artwork is absolutely gorgeous. You can get lost looking at all the lovingly rendered backgrounds and technical detail that Williamson and Garzon cram into every panel here. In addition, Williamson does a very nice job of translating the movie's more tender, character-driven moments, with some really effective poses, facial expressions and moody shadow work. But he also excels at rendering the AT-AT walker assault on the Rebel base – one of the film's biggest and most memorable action sequences – with all the pace, excitement and grandeur of the film itself.

Actually, an uncredited Rick Veitch helped Williamson and Garzon out in the panels in which the AT-AT walkers appeared. The reason Veitch ended up pencilling the Imperial walkers was that Williamson and Garzon were both having trouble imagining how the machines would move, since they only had a couple of blurry polaroids of the models to go on, as Veitch explained on his personal blog in 2010...

"...both [Carlos] and Al were having trouble envisioning the Imperial Walkers that showed up in the script. Lucasfilm had only sent two grainy polaroids of the model used to create the scenes in the movie. Al was fretting so I offered to try and make sense of it with some sketches. I'd worked as a mechanic in my early years and had a reasonable familiarity with how machinery worked. I spent an hour or two figuring out how the thing would have to function and what the parts we couldn't see in the photos might look like. Al was so delighted he put me to work penciling the Walkers throughout the whole sequence. When the film came out we were delighted to see we'd somehow caught the whole flavor of the Walker attack as staged by director, Irving Kirshner."

There can be no doubt that Veitch added considerably to the fluidity and excitement of this sequence, both in this issue and the next. In fact, two years later, during a 1982 interview with James Van Hise, Williamson was still singing Veitch's praises regarding his work on the AT-AT walkers...

"We had these poor scratched-up reproductions of a walker and we couldn't really tell what it actually looked like, but good old Rick figured it out and made it work and now they look like swipes from stuff Lucasfilm gave us when actually they aren't. He made those walkers come to life and look exactly like they were supposed to, and that was on top of doing a beautiful job with the lettering."




One tiny, nit-picky criticism of Williamson's art in this issue would be that he makes a small gaff by swapping Captain Piett for Admiral Ozzel in the scene where the latter is Force-choked by Darth Vader. In the panel below, it is Ozzel who is being choked, while Piett stands nervously by. However, it's clear from the art that Williamson has mistakenly drawn actor Kenneth Colley (who played Piett) as the one being choked, while Michael Sheard (the actor who played Ozzel) stands close by...




Another minor grumble on the art side of things is that Glynis Wein's colouring in this portion of the adaptation is not quite as effective as Carl Gafford's in The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of The Empire Strikes Back paperback. That said, the colouring here is more than adequate, but if push comes to shove, I'd have to say that Gafford's colouring of these pages is superior.

Just like the first instalment of the Empire adaptation, this issue includes scenes that were ultimately left out of the cinematic release of the movie. For example, the "Wampas in the base" sub-plot from last issue is wrapped up, with C-3PO explaining to R2-D2 that the creatures have been enticed into a sealed off section of the base by high pitched whistles and imprisoned there. Another deleted scene features Luke having a weird, Bacta mask removed from his face, while he and Leia express their affection for each other and almost kiss, only to be interrupted by C-3PO...




The above scene comes right before Han enters the medical centre and has an angry and sarcastic exchange with Leia (a scene that was included in the finished version of the film). The cut scene adds an extra dimension to the moment in the film where Leia says "well, I guess you don't know everything about women yet" and then promptly gives Luke a passionate – though in hindsight, a very uncomfortable and incestuous – kiss.

All in all, Star Wars #40 is a hugely enjoyable, right ripping read, with some great dialogue, some fantastic sequential art and all the excitement of the movie. The quick-fire tempo and breathtaking pace of this issue just doesn't let up from start to finish and the reader finds themselves tearing through it at a rapid speed, only slowing momentarily to savour Williamson's exquisite artwork. Star Wars comics just don't come any better than this.

Continuity issues: None

Favourite panel:



Favourite quote: "Why is it when things seem to get settled...everything falls apart?" – C-3PO rhetorically asks R2-D2 to explain the never ending turmoil of life in the Rebel Alliance.

Please note that there are direct links to every issue that I've reviewed so far (77 of 'em!) in the very first post of this thread. So, if there's a specific issue you want, you don't have to trawl through pages and pages of posts searching for it, you can just go here and directly click on the issue that you want.

I thought I should mention this for all the new readers that have joined in with this thread recently, just in case some folks weren't aware of the fact.

I've never been a fan of the art from the Empire and Jedi adaptations. The illustrations are of a high quality, but they look like isolated film stills. They never really mesh to create a narrative.

A lot of that, in my opinion, looks like it came from Lucasfilm and Fox. They had a huge movie coming out and they wanted the comic to look as much like it as possible. Having to either omit or obscure a lot of the most memorable scenes to avoid spoiling them didn't help either.

I didn't realize that the adaptation of ESB had come so erly after SW#38, the Michael Golden one.

Those were good years for the Star Wars comics, what with the adaptation of the second film and the artistic changes... The brilliant Simonson run was right behind the corner.