While I know I had a few comics given to me over the years when I was a bit younger than this, the first comic I really identified as “my first comic” is that of Star Wars issue 8. With the huge popularity of the film at the time and the fact that for me it was pretty much a life altering experience in terms of what I would become interested in,discovering that there were comics being produced that took place after the movie was pretty damn enticing. And for a six or seven year old kid, seeing a Star Wars cover that had my favorite characters standing alongside a seemingly other Jedi character, a porcupine character and a walking, talking green rabbit named Jaxxon? Oh man. The innocence of youth and where ones imagination took you.
It wasn’t until probably a good seven or eight years later that I ended up making my way into my first comic book shop, which lead me to finding out about the mysterious thing called back issues. That got me to explore the film adaptation, which was the first six issues, and then some really enticing material after that and through the other issues I missed because of the terrible nature of newsstand distribution.
Star Wars comics at this time was an interesting beast because it didn’t have any real oversight from George Lucas and they basically did whatever the heck they wanted. Which made for some amusing slashes to “continuity” a few years later when Empire Strikes Back came out and they had to adapt that and jettison a lot of what the issues in between did. These early issues were fantastically fun works, which showed the kind of serial space adventure material that Roy Thomas handled so well in writing. But for me, it was seeing the way that Howard Chaykin had captured the look of the actors so well for me and breathed new life into the franchise – before it even was a franchise.
What the book was about:
Han Solo and Chewbacca are hired by Ramiz, a moisture farmer on Aduba-3, to protect his village from a band of local thugs known as the Cloud-Riders led by Serji-X Arrogantus. Han and Chewbacca hire six misfit spacers to help them with the task, including Don-Wan Kihotay, an old man who thinks he is a Jedi Knight, and Jaxxon, a rabbit-like creature with a mean disposition. Serji-X tries to convince Han to forget about his mission to protect the peasants and even offers him compensation, but Han declines. Meanwhile, on Yavin 4, Luke Skywalker, C-3PO and R2-D2 leave in a scout ship to search for a location for the new Rebel Alliance base.