Current reads.

Star Wars: Doomworld

Roy Tomas, Archie Goodwin, Don Glut, writers

I recently found some Star Wars postcards at a kitschy shop in Ann Arbor. I thought they were hilarious - and then, I found the actual comic books featured on said cards. Doomworld is a pretty darn amazing, and hefty, collection. This is old-school Marvel stuff produced right after A New Hope was put out. The first third of the book is a retelling of the film, with little bits of dialogue added or removed - which is interesting, but not why I'm reading it. The rest is a smattering of clichéd science fiction plotlines with Star Wars characters shoved in. I mean, living in the era of Xizor and role-playing games and entire encyclopediae dedicated to alien creatures, I take it for granted that these '70s writers and artists had only two hours of film and a demand for excessive merchandizing to go on. With that said, there is a Seven Samurai plotline - including a plate mail-wearing, lance-weilding, white-bearded, speech-making man claiming to be a Jedi knight, named Don-Wan Kihotay... yes, it's Quixote, we GET IT - and a slough of other hijinks. Chewbacca looks like a sasquatch from the burn ward. Han looks like the Hoff, Thor, Prince Valiant, but never Han. There is a myriad of weird slang, like "star-hopper", "planet-jumper", and so on. Did I mention the (oh no!) space pirates, complete with cutlasses and eyepatches? So, really, it's a relic of a much more innocent time. Even though I haven't fallen in love with some Marvel classics, like X-Men (and I really wanted to!), this strikes me as really fun, old-fashioned comicry. My inner - chortling, entirely too well-informed, I-knew-Vader-was-Luke's-father-before-I-was-even-cognizant-of-it - Star Wars nerd aside, it's an enrapturing read.