Story: J.W. Rinzler
Art: Mike Mayhew
What They Say:
The Star Wars is not your father’s Star Wars tale. Based on George Lucas’s original rough draft of Episode 4: A New Hope, The Star Wars features all your favorite characters in radically different roles and guises. Giant green alien Han Solo anyone?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I’ve had an on and off relationship with Star Wars over the years. I was a fanatic as a kid, loving virtually anything to do with the franchise, especially the extended universe books. I even enjoyed the sub-par prequel trilogy. (There’s no accounting for taste in children.) I continued to read random selections of Star Wars content into adulthood, and I’ve always enjoyed the original films, but I haven’t been pumped for anything out of the Star Wars camp in a good while.
But when I heard about this oddball mini-series coming out from Dark Horse, based on Lucas’s original New Hope rough draft, I got pretty excited. I knew that things in that original script were bonkers compared to the final product, including a giant green alien Han Solo, an English-speaking R2D2 and a helmet-less, non-force using Darth Vader. It sounds fresh and interesting, right? In a lot of ways it really is, but perhaps in my lust for a Star Wars tale I’d never experienced before, I forgot the fact that this book is based on a rough draft. There’s a reason rough drafts don’t usually become films and comics: They’re generally pretty terrible.
I believe George Lucas when he says that he had the entire Star Wars saga planned out from the very beginning, because the similarities of plot between The Stars Wars and Episode One: The Phantom Menace are uncanny, right down to Princess Leia wearing ludicrously huge and ornate headdresses ala Princess Amidala. The core of the story centers on Jedi-Bendu General Luke Skywalker and his impetuous young padawan learner, Annikin Starkiller. The New Galactic Empire and their moon-sized space fortress are encroaching on Aquilae, the only free system in the galaxy. When the king of Aquilae dies, the Jedi-Bendu must defend his daughter, the now-Queen Leia, from falling into their grasp.
The Star Wars is a long and complex book, with a giant cast of characters, a rapidly evolving plot, and scene changes that sometime occur at a rate of two or three per page. If this version of the script had been filmed, it would have been nearly four hours long. Rinzler did a good job of managing all these slippery elements, but the plot moves like a film: very quickly, and even he couldn’t manage to keep confusion from creeping in during the more involved portions. Plot developments also often feel rushed and random. (I mean, the Wookies, who not twelve pages prior were a band of tribal savages that couldn’t speak basic, lead the charge on the death star, piloting Y-wings. That may sound awesome to a Star Wars fan, and maybe it is, but believability and plot-wise it makes no sense.)
But that giant cast of characters is probably the laser that blasts the whole thing. No character actually occupies the spot of either Protagonist or Antagonist, leaving the narrative unfocused. The villains Darth Vader and Sith Lord Valorum are near non-entities, only appearing at the beginning of the story and the end, and have little to do with the actual outcome of the plot. The Emperor appears in about four panels and is a sniveling politician stereotype. Leia may be the most painfully anemic character, relegated to do-nothing damsel in distress as opposed to her strong, active personality in the film. The “romantic” relationship between her and Annikin is also a ridiculous stretch, considering they have very little meaningful interaction throughout the course of the book, and ends in a kiss that is unearned and awkward as hell.
And the bare bones characters are just the tip of the iceberg. Multiple other problems present themselves throughout, including important action happening off-panel, leaving characters to barf exposition to fill you in, contrived plot devices like Jai gas, (a mysterious knockout gas that somehow only affects Jedi-Bendu,) and dead weight characters like Leia’s little twin brothers and R2D2 and C3PO, who struggle to be funny this time around.
And I could go on.
If there’s any saving grace to be found here, it lies in the art. Mayhew’s large, dynamic scenes and character work are very attractive and lend an epic “Star Wars” feel to the proceedings. The covers and promotional work by Mayhew and others available in this volume are also gorgeous, being heavily inspired by the work of original Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie. Mayhew’s facial work I’m a little bit torn on though. He has a tendency to create acutely realistic and detailed expressions that are attached to much less detailed bodies, leading the art to occasionally dip into the uncanny valley. But on a whole, this doesn’t detract much from the overall quality of the art.
In Summary:
The idea of adapting George’s nutso, Flash-Gordon-esque original script must have sounded like a really good idea to a lot of people. It certainly did to me. But the reality is much more sobering. I can see a die hard Star Wars fan getting a kick out of seeing their beloved characters so transplanted and transformed, but novelty alone definitely isn’t worth MSRP in this case. “Rough Draft,” is a phrase used on the front cover of this volume, and the emphasis should definitely be on “Rough.”
Grade: D+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Books
Release Date: July 22nd, 2014
MSRP: $39.99
