Comic Wars

In this age of movie DVDs that issue a month after a movie debuts in theatres, novelizations and comic-book adaptations of films are essentially anachronisms of the pre-Betamax era. Yet such tie-ins once played an important role in publicizing films, as well as serving as a souvenir of the flicks.

The current issue of ALTER EGO, a magazine about comics history edited by longtime comics writer/editor Roy Thomas, features a fascinating article by Thomas about how the comic-book adaptation of STAR WARS came to be. Folks may recall that the novelization of STAR WARS (by Alan Dean Foster, ghost-writing as George Lucas) came out in paperback about a year before the movie; and the six-issue STAR WARS movie adaptation began running a few months before the movie came out -- raising fears at Marvel that the adaptation would be a fiasco if the film bombed. Lucas and his assistants approached Thomas with the project, since Lucas, a comics fan, specifically wanted Thomas to write the adaptation and Howard Chaykin to illustrate it. The plan was to raise consciousness of the film using the comics miniseries.

The movie, of course, did not bomb. Whether the comic book helped add to the movie's bottom line may never be known. But the project certainly helped Marvel; once the movie started going gangbusters, the comic sold in prodigious amounts -- especially after Marvel reprinted it several times, in multiple formats.