For about a decade Star Wars was decidedly not cool.
After the original trilogy was completed in 1983 series creator George Lucas tried moving Star Wars to TV with a series of Ewok themed television movies in ’84 and ’85 and Saturday morning cartoon series Droids from ’85-’86. But neither of these two ventures caught on and after ’86 Star Wars was gone and out of the public eye.
Sure, the movies were still available to rent and they’d also appear on TV from time to time to mark special occasions but for the rest of the 1980s and most of the 1990s there was nothing new being released on the Star Wars front.
Well, almost nothing.
During the dark decade when Star Wars was decidedly uncool and missing from the public eye Dark Horse Comics picked up the mantel dropped by Marvel Comics when they stopped publishing their line of Star Wars comics in ’86 and started publishing a new line of stories starting in ’91.
In the late 1980s Dark Horse had made a name for themselves by publishing licensed Aliens and Predator comics with new expanded storylines from those two franchises. Writers for Aliens and Predator comics continued the threads from the films and took readers to new and exciting places and with Star Wars they did much the same thing.
Dark Horse’s first Star Wars title, Star Wars: Dark Empire, continued the story from the movies in comic form. Here, just because the Emperor and Darth Vader are dead and the second Death Star destroyed doesn’t mean that the Empire was defeated or that the galactic war was finished. Luke Skywalker, now a powerful Jedi like his father, along with the droids, Chewbacca and Han and his wife Leia all continue the good fight.
There were Dark Horse stories that took place during and after the movies and there were also stories of what was happening to the Jedi millennia before the films too. These comics went places the films with their limited running times never could and expanded the Star Wars universe a great deal.
But earlier this year something odd happened.
When it was announced that Lucas had sold Star Wars to Disney and that there was going to be a new series of movies it was also announced that Dark Horse would lose their license to produce new Star Wars comics. Marvel, who’s also owned by Disney, would regain that license and would start producing a line of new comics this year.
Which wasn’t completely unexpected. Even though Dark Horse had been one of the lone Star Wars lights through most of the 1990s when no one else cared that much about the property it’s not like mega-corporations like Disney are known for their loyalty so the Marvel switch seemed inevitable.
And when it was also announced that the only “official” Star Wars stories would be from the six movies and anything new produced by Disney, effectively making 37 years of novels and comics an sort of unofficial fever dream, that wasn’t totally unexpected either. The mantra of Hollywood seems to be, “Where’s the fun in telling new stories that fit with the past when you can make it so that the past didn’t really happen and start over with a clean slate?”
What WAS unexpected was that on midnight on December 31st when Dark Horse lost their license all their Star Wars stories vanished from their online store and a few days later appeared in the Marvel store with their logo on the cover. This isn’t totally uncommon since recently Dark Horse began releasing collections of the original Marvel Star Wars comics. What was a bit weird was that it seems like whereas Dark Horse was releasing new collections of stories, Marvel simply took what Dark Horse had created, placed their logo on the material and stamped “Legends” across the cover to indicate that these stories are no longer “official.”
Overnight the Dark Horse material became comics non-grata.
Still, simply having the Dark Horse material available in Marvel form is better than the alternative; that Marvel would shelve the the comics and they would eventually be lost to time.
Dinosaurs Attack! is all but forgotten today — other than by a few middle-aged sci-fi fans like me who can remember where they were the first time they saw this trading card set. (I was at Keltsch in Georgetown where I discovered the cards on clearance for just 10¢ each and ended up buying every pack I could afford!)
It’s probably been at least 15 years since I bought a Star Wars comic book, and that’s coming from a guy who used to buy everything Star Wars related I could get my hands on. But what got me collecting Star Wars comics again in 2013 was the new comic The Star Wars. This comic is an illustrated version of George Lucas’ original Star Wars screenplay written years before the movie was filmed and is quite different to what ended up on screen. While the overall plot and character names are similar between the two, there are quite a few differences between Star Wars and The Star Wars like Skywalker being a grizzled old Jedi general, Darth Vader being just another Darth of many and R2D2 speaking! It’s an interesting “what if” look at sci fi history.
It shows from the viewer’s perspective on the ground what satellites are overhead right now or 10 minutes from now, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year. For an astronomy geek like me that’s heaven.