Star Wars: The Comic Book That Saved Marvel!

Howard Chaykin agreed to pencil and ink the series, and seemed enthusiastic about it. He and I soon received our own copies of the screenplay, as well as of other, earlier potential plot materials which George had written; I'm not sure why we were given the latter, but I've hung onto them ever since. We learned -- and some of this I may have heard at that earlier dinner with George, by now a year in the past -- that, in one early version, Luke Starkiller had been a 1970s-ish Flash Gordon type in a wholly different story -- that Han Solo had originally been the name of a giant amphibian -- that one scenario had taken place on the planet of the Wookiees. All this fascinating stuff served, in its way, as my introduction to a part of the behind-the-scenes, print-the-legend Hollywood.

With a minimum of guidance from me (I forget precisely how much, but it wasn't much -- I had other things to keep me busy), and armed with the mere handful of stills which, it turned out, was all Charley could actually come up with at this early stage, Howard started drawing the first issue.

Meanwhile, up at Marvel, even before I made my actual move to L.A. (purposely scheduled to take place over the Bicentennial Weekend of July 4, 1976), Marvel's circulation director Ed Shukin made it known that he was unhappy with the prospect of publishing a six-issue adaptation of some science-fiction movie with no stars in it that anybody had ever heard of (except for Alec Guinness, of course, but he was no Robert Redford). Ed Shukin had a formidable reputation as a circulation director, before and during his Marvel career, and I've no doubt that he earned it... but in this one case, he would turn out to be considerably behind the curve.

Equally worrisome from Ed's point of view was that, though Marvel got the adaptation rights for bupkis, it was with the stipulation that at least two issues of the six had to be on newsstands before the movie's release date in May 1977. After all, from 20th's point of view, the comic was intended to help the film, not vice versa. Ed, quite naturally, would have preferred to have had it the other way around. What if the movie was a bomb? Worse still -- what if the comic book was a bomb?

Stan bowed out with a characteristic smile, and left Ed Shukin and me to fight it out. Which we did, though in a civilized way.

Shukin suggested that I adapt the movie in just two issues, maybe even one. (In 1974 we had done a two-issue version of the film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which hadn't made much of a contribution to Marvel's bottom line.) My response was that I felt it would take six issues to do the book "right." However, I informed him and Stan, if Marvel wished to have someone else write the adaptation, I'd bow out and keep busy with Conan, Red Sonja, The Invaders, et al. I didn't need the extra work. My position was basically take it or leave it... Marvel's call. Of course, since it was my project and the movie people had specifically asked for me as writer, I had a fairly strong hand in that particular poker game. But I wasn't bluffing. Someone else would've had to write an adaptation of Star Wars that ran less than six issues.

After that, Ed Shukin stopped opposing me directly, but he was heard to say that he wished we weren't doing the comic at all.