"It's understating it to say that Star Wars struck a chord in me," Walks says. "Like everyone else in the theater, I was entertained, but there was something more. I couldn't articulate it, but Star Wars touched something inside me, made me feel something I had never felt before, and when I walked out of the mall that day, I only knew that I wanted to keep that feeling."
"It was a rainy, rainy day, and I was thinking about how different my environment was from the one in which Luke lived, and those thoughts sort of started me thinking about the way Star Wars looked," Walks recalls. "I loved the stormtroopers and TIE fighters, and Han's costume, and I couldn't wait to get home and draw Darth Vader. It occurred to me then that somebody had to have come up with that look. Somewhere an artist had designed Darth Vader's mask. My next thought was nothing less than an epiphany -- I could do that. I could be an artist. It was that simple, and from then on, I knew what I wanted to do."
In junior high and high school, Walks attended every art class available, while reading an endless amount of books and comics. "There was sort of a comics 'mini-boom' in the '80s, and I took full advantage. I read just about everything, from Atari Force to Nathaniel Dusk; but my favorites were Jon Sable: Freelance and The New Teen Titans. I subscribed to Starlog, got a job at a movie theater, and spent the early '80s seeing every science fiction movie that came out -- and thanks to the success of Star Wars, there were plenty."
In 1985, Walks watched a series of interviews called "The Power of Myth" with journalist Bill Moyers and writer/philosopher Joseph Campbell. "After seeing the interviews and reading Campbell's masterwork, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I recognized what it was about Star Wars that had touched so many of us. To put it simply, the ideas and themes in Star Wars are universal and the tale of Luke Skywalker is one that's been told thousands of times over thousands of years. Joseph Campbell calls this story 'The Hero's Journey', and it is a tale of self-discovery; a universal myth in which the names of the characters change, but the story remains the same. George Lucas once said that Star Wars is 'a story for a generation growing up without fairy tales,' and I think that the movie resonates with us. "Because underneath the Jedi robes and stormtrooper armor, Star Wars is about the same thing as The Odyssey or any of the stories our grandparents? grandparents told them. Star Wars is about us, and it resonates with us because we see ourselves in the characters up there on that screen." In 1994, Walks would later explore the Joseph Campbell/George Lucas connection in the Star Wars Galaxy III series of trading cards for Topps.
"When I look back on the books and movies that meant something to me, it's evident that in almost every instance there was that same spark of recognition," Walks continues. "Those stories were important to me because I identified with the characters, and because I identified with them, I cared about what happened to them. And it's no surprise that in most cases millions of others cared too, because we humans are much more alike than we are different. I guess there is such a thing as a universal truth, a sort of indefinable something that all of us have in common. We can't all articulate it, but I think that consciously or not, all of us can feel it, especially when we share a good story. Campbell said that storytellers and artists are today's shamans and mythmakers, and when I'm sitting in a darkened theater sharing the exact same emotion with 200 other people, I can believe in magic."
