Ah, the bootleg DVD. In China, this manner of receiving entertainment is all but an enterprise. (I have a particular memory of a friend’s father bringing home a pirated copy of Pirates of the Caribbean from a business trip to China, where the subtitles were clearly from a different film—during their duel, Will Turner accused Jack of never coming home: “All you want to do is go disco disco with your friends!”)
But before that, did you know that there were lianhuanhua? Meaning the equivalent of “linked picture book,” these were an early form of comic in China—many of which were adapted from popular films that the public didn’t have access to.
And you need to look at this Star Wars one.
First off, if you’d like some background on lianhuanhua, you should take a look at Nick Stember’s informative article on the subject. He is also responsible for translating a lianhuanhua version of Star Wars found a few years back by Maggie Greene at the Wen Miao book market in Shanghai.
Made in the 1980s, and seemingly unaware of the trilogy’s completion (there are elements from Empire Strikes Back, but no indication that Return of the Jedi was viewed in the making of this comic), this adaptation is both similar to and comically different from the original 1977 film. There is no proper way to explain it. You’ll have to take a peek for yourself, but here are a few of my favorite panels:
We all remember that Princess Leia definitely looked like this when she was captured by the Imperials, yes? And Darth Vader was angry at her sassy hip cock, so he attempted to emulate it? Remember Leia’s flowing locks and bare feet? Nothing spells defiance of Empire so well as a lack of footwear.
So… this is the interior of a landspeeder. Ii’s kind of like a TARDIS, I guess—gigantic on the inside. And you need a headset to operate it? And yes, that is meant to be Luke and C-3PO looking for the wandering R2.
Obi-Wan Kenobi remembers the time when he was a Jedi Knight, the same as Luke’s father. No, like, an actual knight. An armored medieval knight on some kind of tractor motorcycle. Those were the days. Joust-cycling. Those kids racing T-16s don’t even know.
Darth Vader is RIDING A TRICERATOPS? Obviously. Well, he’s sort of posing in front of it, really. In… in boob armor? It really looks like boob armor.
This might be my favorite panel. Obi-Wan’s all, “Your father wanted you to have this lightsaber when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn’t allow it. It’s called a lightsaber. After you practice with it a little, head over to my in-desert bar and pour yourself some J&B. Yeah, that’s the good stuff.”
Now this is how you teach someone to use the Force on a spaceship… you hand them a lightsaber and then let them float around in zero-G. It really gets the midichlorians pumping.
We’re looking for your rebel base, Princess. We assume it’s somewhere near the Kennedy Space Center. On Dantooine. (You have to presume that the majority of the intended audience for these comics didn’t read English, but even so, what’s the reference for this picture?)
Apparently, someone missed the memo that not all stormtroopers are Boba Fetts. Therefore, they are all appropriately outfitted in Mandalorian armor. Outside of the one medical droid.
Wait, who forgot to tell us that CHEWIE IS A CHIMPANZEE? I feel cheated. Personally, emotionally, esoterically, allegorically.
“I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to…uh… hey, there.” Everything about this picture. Luke in Fett armor, Leia about to burst into song, the heart on her belt, the weird demon behind her seriously thehellisthat?
The base on Yavin 4, now with Egyptian sphinxes hanging around because DO IT RIGHT. Also, the ship at the top coming in for landing is the Millennium Falcon. It is. Just go with it.
So that’s Leia and the guy next to her is supposed to be Han. Everyone is so happy that Leia made it back to the Alliance! So happy that they took out their tourist cameras and are happily flashing away as she goes to deliver essential military information. New snapshots! Ones for the kids to develop, provided the base doesn’t get blown up by the Death Star in the next hour or so.
Leia, offering Luke a traditional Alderaanian blessing of tapping two fingers to the forehead before a battle. Wait—wait, C-3PO and R2-D2 are hugging. 3PO’s giving him a dome kiss! LACK OF ORGANIC MATTER CANNOT STOP TRUE LOVE.
This was done in the 80s, which is probably why Luke heads to blow up the Death Star in what appears to be a NASA spacesuit. Also, in this version he is made part of Blue Team rather than Red Team which is just wrong, everything wrong, so very wrong.
And then, the moment we’ve all been waiting for—Luke gets a new girlfriend! Um, oh—oh no, wait, can we please backtrack a little I’m just concerned is all, because how much do they actually know about each other, maybe they should talk a little first, see how much they have in common STOP THIS IS A BAD BAD THING.
It’s really worth it to read the translation because all of the little things that the narrative gets wrong are so funny. Do it. Go now. Trust your feelings.
I like this better than the original. More! (Especially more pyramids and Obi-Wan in armor.)
My favorite part: Vader’s “transuniversal carrier ship” is the Space Battleship Yamato!! (After putting on some weight…) And Luke’s landspeeder is apparently a small passenger jetliner.
Armored Jedi on a motorcycle jousting with sith lords on tricerotops. This must happen. Get on that Disney.
OMG I recognize that first panel of Leia and Vader! That is a straight-up copy of an old (I mean SERIOUSLY old, from the 40’s) panel from Prince Valiant by Hal Foster! I have the reprint book in which the original appears – which, coincidentally, was published in the early 80’s… The original is Aleta vs a bunch of Tuareg nomads, and all the poses are the same, they just dressed up all the Tuaregs as aliens, Stormtroopers and Vader. Leia/Aleta is EXACTLY the same.
If Vader can have boob armor, then it just isn’t for women any more!
(No, seriously, none of you guys need to emulate Vader here, really)
I have to say, I kinda wish that the empire had been using Mandalorian Supercommandos as their line infantry.
Of course, the trilogy would be much shorter, and with a far more pro-empire ending, if that were the case.
As for the whole Blue Squadron thing, didn’t Lucas originally want there to be 4 squadrons (Blue, Red, Gold, and Green, IIRC)? The problem was that Blue Squadron didn’t work so well against a blue screen, so the X-wings got moved to Red (which was a Y-wing group) and all the Y-wings to Gold.
I wonder how many people were involved in drawing this, the character and ship designs are wildly variable. At one point Vader is flying a legit Star Destroyer, at another point he’s flying the Yamato, and the TIE fighters look like mini-Yamatos.
We should play spot-the-reference. I don’t have a Prince Valiant book, but I recognized a scene from Star Trek TMP, and I’ll bet the Vader triceratops picture was borrowed from Boris.
Oh, and the depiction of the Sandpeople is seriously racist.
Don’t have time to go read the whole thing now, but thanks for posting. This kinda sorta just maybe possibly made my day.
Lol, funny thing is Luke being in Blue Squadren is about the only thing this didn’t get wrong. In both the book version of Star Wars and the Marvel comic (both of which were released before the movie hit theaters) Luke was in the Blue Squadren. Lucas changed it to the Red Squadren for the movie.
And while it may not be as bad as this version, the Marvel comic is also pretty funny with all the things it got wrong in the stories it told between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes back. For example, it’s obvious that Lucas didn’t tell any one at Marvel that Leia was Luke’s sister and was going to end up with Han! Damn, why did I sell my comic book collection after I got married (oh wait, I remember why now), I would love to go back and read some of those Star Wars issues. Remember the green anthropomorphic bunny alien bounty hunter? That’s right, I said green anthropomorphic bunny alien bounty hunter, lol.
@9: At the time you’re referring to, Lucas didn’t know yet that Leia was Luke’s sister and would end up with Han. He’s spent the past couple of decades claiming that he had the whole story worked out in advance, but that’s revisionist history; there’s abundant evidence to prove that he was making it up as he went.
There’s also the Marvel annual with a flashback to an adventure that the young Obi-Wan Kenobi went on with two other Jedi: the future Darth Vader and Luke’s father.
I still have most of the Marvel Star Wars comic, even though I don’t have any other SW literature (I lost interest after book 2 of the Thrawn trilogy and never came back). It’s still my favorite incarnation of the franchise, including the movies. It did such a nifty job of building a rich, reasonably cohesive universe, even if it’s a different one than the later productions have given us.
@10
Lol, I am well aware that that Lucas had no idea that Leia was Luke’s sister or that Darth Vader was their father when he made Star Wars, I was trying to be funny (unsuccessfully it appears). I had forgotten about the flashback in that annual, too funny. Another interesting thing is that there was no mention of A New Hope or episode IV in the Marvel adaption.
I loved the Marvel Star Wars comics when I was a kid, I had every issue from one up until about a year after the adaption of The Empire Strikes Back. It really sucked that Marvel had to keep Han on ice for the couple of years inbetween Empire and Return, at least I thought so since Han was always my favorite character.
Speaking of the Empire adaption, did you read the pocket book edition of that adaption, the one that came out before the movie hit theaters? The artist obviously hadn’t seen a picture of Yoda from the movie since Yoda was a little blue guy (and by little I mean small enough to stand on Luke’s shoulder, lol)? I believe Marvel was able to change how Yoda looked in the actual comic version since yoda didn’t make an appearance in the first couple of issues of the adaption.
I also didn’t find the Thrawn books to be anything special either. I did read the whole trilogy but thought it was just meh.
@11: Of course, the subtitle A New Hope and the “episode” number were not added to the film until its 1981 re-release. The film’s original title was simply Star Wars, and that’s how I think of it to this day.
I did read the novelization of TESB when it came out, but I don’t remember anything about it. As for the comic adaptation, they probably took less time to make than the novel, since books need a lot of lead time. So they probably had more current image references available.
The reason I got fed up with the Thrawn trilogy (as it was later titled) was because it wasn’t really a trilogy (three complete stories that form a larger arc) but a single really long story arbitrarily chopped into three volumes. So there wasn’t really any resolution to the first or second book; the story just abruptly stopped and we had to wait a year or more for the continuation. I didn’t appreciate being left hanging like that, and wasn’t intrigued enough to wait that long, so I just walked away. That was part of the reason I gave up on Gentry Lee’s (and allegedly Arthur C. Clarke’s) sequel trilogy to Rendezvous with Rama around the same period — although the fact that those books were gratuitously grim and depressing and anathema to everything I love about the original book was also a factor.
Funny how you’re discussing Yodas appearance in Marvels adaption.. What about the two-legged, yellow/green skinned Jabba the Hutt?
I’m with wingracer.
I cannot lie: I need a deluxe, large-format version of this comic. Glossy paper and everything. I NEED IT. IT MUST BE MINE.
I feel cheated when I see that we could have had Jedi Knights jousting on tricked-out, missile-equipped motorbikes. We need this, badly.
The original Star Wars novel by “George Lucas” (actually Alan Dean Foster) was released in 1976, months ahead of the movie—I remember reading it over Thanksgiving ’76.
In it, Luke is “Blue 5” during the Battle of Yavin, and his wingmates are members of Blue Squadron.
Thanks for sharing that, Emily. Fantastic Star Wars retrobilia I’m really glad to have seen.
I love the cacti to represent Tatooine. It’s a desert, it must have giant cacti. And hey, Chewbacca and the droids get medals too!
actually I wonder if the illustrators had the Star Wars novelization as their sole visual reference, because IIRC it had a few photos bound in the middle. It’s weird how there are a few illustrations that are actually correct (and somehow R2D2 is accurate in the entire booklet) and the quoted dialogue is generally close. I mean, how do they get “Let’s blow this thing and go home” right, and draw Chewie more-or-less right and then later like he’s from Planet of the Apes? whatevrer it was, they had some kind of very limited reference material for the film itself, not shared between the artist(s). And all the rest they made up/re-used from somewhere else.
There’s a panel that looks very Buck Rogers, so I’m going to guess that Kennedy Space Center picture with Vader might come from something like that.
My imagination can definitely work with this. I dig the missile bike knight. :)
In reguards to the JB bottle, it reminds me of a scean from the moive Message from Space in which one of the actors was wearing a cutty shark whiskey apron in the kicthen.
From the looks of the complete comic, it appears we have more than a pirated “Star Wars”. There are so many panels that were ripped from other comics, magazine ads, pulp magazine covers and news magazine photos and then re-drawn to make this comic I doubt there are any actual original artwork in it at all.
The image for page 33 posted is driving me crazy. I know that fish-eye lens image from somewhere. I just can’t place it. Anyone else have an idea where it comes from?