From the Pages of Star Wars Insider: The Mighty Walt

Legendary comic scribe and artist Walt Simonson remembers his time on Marvel’s Star Wars comics very fondly. Not just for the camaraderie with other creators he enjoyed during that time but also for the sheer joy of creating memorable stories that still stand out in the minds of fans. What was it that drew him to work on Star Wars?

“The checks cashed!” He laughs. “No, seriously, there was a period when I prided myself on doing every science-fiction comic book that was being published by Marvel at the time. I drew the Alien graphic novel, I drew Star Wars, I drew and wrote some Battlestar Galactica. I did some Star Trek covers, so I had the market cornered on science-fiction comics for quite a while.”

“My first Marvel Comics issue was Star Wars 16, which introduced Valance the bounty hunter. Archie Goodwin wrote that and asked me to draw it—and anything Archie wanted me to do, I loved doing. He was such a great guy to work with. So, I did that one story, for which I penciled and inked the cover and Bob Wiacek inked the insides. Bob did such a great job. That would have come out after the first film but before Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”

After Issue 50, Walt took over the penciling duties for the comic. David Michelinie was the writer and Tom Palmer continued as inker, with Weezie as editor. Their first issue was 51, titled “Resurrection of Evil.” It was a unique story because it featured a predictive storyline that was almost problematic for Lucasfilm. Walt described the rules that were in place back then.

“Now remember, this comic came out after the second film so there were things that we were not allowed to do,” Simonson explains. “For instance, we couldn’t do stories with Han Solo because he was still stuck in carbonite. We could not have Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker meet—in fact, they could not ever be in the same place. We could not have Luke and Leia romantically involved and they did not explain to us why. So here we had a comic where you couldn’t use one principal hero, show the hero with the main villain, and you couldn’t have the main female character have a relationship with the hero. That left us with some pretty severe limitations on what we could do with a story!”