Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Another replacement, but I'll hang on to my originals too, thanks:

I had to order a Christmas present from Amazon, so I decided to throw in a couple books for myself and save on the shipping. One book didn't make it (but I found it in Everett myself!) and I thought the other one was going to be shipped separately. Then I checked the present and it was in there...Dark Horse's collection of rare or uncollected stories, Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space, volume 1.

The big selling point is probably the creators: there's early work from Alan Moore, Chris Claremont, Walt Simonson, Alan Davis, and more. Some of the stories are pure apocrypha (the Alan Moore one in particular, I think) from the days before Star Wars had really settled into a solid look and feel; so it isn't necessarily "in continuity," but that may depend on your tastes. Some of the stories were from Marvel UK, where Star Wars was a weekly comic, and they had to generate a few more stories. (Or use backup features--I was looking at a cover that also featured Guardians of the Galaxy, Deathlok, and Tales of the Watcher.)

"The Day After the Death Star!" is a personal favorite: restless after the Rebellion's victory party, Luke takes Artoo and his X-wing for a quick flight to think...only to run into a lost TIE fighter. Forced to clip the fighter with his wing, Luke and the TIE fighter pilot end up face-to-face and hand-to-hand in a swamp on Yavin IV; where Luke learns more than a couple lessons. "The Weapons Master," is another, where Princess Leia explains how a young woman from the pacifist planet of Alderaan got so handy with a blaster. (Retroactively, I suppose they'd say because of her lineage; but this story is more interesting; she isn't a natural.) Those two were part of a Marvel paperback that I've had for what, thirty-some years, and it's kind of worn. This version actually has a few recap pages that were redundant when they were packaged together, but in the original black-and-white.

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