Star Wars #19, January 1979. The floating head collage is one of the great '70s conventions, gracing both movie posters and comic covers. It's an economical way of placing an ensemble cast into an otherwise difficult to compose situation. By ripping the heads off the lead characters, the artist immediately treads into abstraction, so why stop there? Why not come up with an abstract or surreal way to symbolize not just the players but the plot as well? The skull at the center of the space station makes it clear that either bad stuff is going down at the Wheel. Either that, or Death itself is suffering one mother of a stress headache.
