The new Star Wars #1 came out this week (Major Spoilers’ own Chris Wilson weighs in here), and many fans have expressed that the franchise returning to the Marvel Comics fold (where it originated back in 1977) somehow feels right. For many of the years that I have been enjoying and collecting comics, there has been an ongoing rivalry between the “Big Two” companies, Marvel and DC, and many people identify their stance as collector entirely by which company they prefer. Is it this that makes us want to see the big M in the corner of a Star Wars book? Is it nostalgia? Do we, the fans, somehow assign more importance (and by extension, more “reality”) to Marvel and DC books than to those from Dark Horse? It’s an odd thought process, and one that leads us to today’s long, long ago query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) finds your lack of faith something something galaxy far, far away, asking: Why does the Star Wars franchise returning to Marvel Comics matter to us as fans?
4 Comments
It doesn’t really matter to me. I’m neither for or against it at this point. While I did immensely enjoy the work Dark Horse did, I also enjoyed many of the OLD Marvel Star Wars comics and was even thrilled when many Marvel created alien species were semi-canonized (Zeltron, Lepi and Nagai were all created during the original Marvel run and appeared throughout other material from comics to games and novels), but I don’t really have any strong feelings for or against who actually publishes the comics.
Personally, I’m more interested in the content than I am who publishes it.
Im pretty much on the same boat with this. I liked both old Marvel and many of the Dark Horse books as well. Best SW comics however were Archie Goodwin newspaper strips. While this early stage with established characters and safe plots in movie canon arent really that interesting to me, I’d like to see in what direction they will go eventually when more material gets out. I’ll wait and see.
It doesn’t matter much to me, either. Historically speaking, comic series based on movies have traditionally sucked just as badly as movies based on comic books used to suck. You end up with mediocre stories that can’t tie into the movie continuity because they can’t do anything that would derail any forthcoming movie sequels, and you end up with stories that don’t matter for exactly the same reason, and you also get artists who either can’t draw the characters or the space ships properly. The Falcon, more often than not, ends up looking like a reject from a Lego bin, etc. There are exceptions, of course. There were a few issues of Dark Horse’s Indiana Jones series where the art was spectacular in its day, but generally, movie comic books are only worth hanging up in granny’s outhouse when you run out of corn cobs. And let’s not even get started on movie tie in comics for movies that were based on comics, originally, and then get turned back into comics if the movie proves to be a hit. The result is nearly always a disaster, and never as good as the original comics were. The major exceptions that I can think of was Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. The comic was based on the animated movie, but the art was spot on since the same fellow did the art for both the movie and the comic – and Akira – and both comic series greatly expanded on the movie story, and without giving us Giant Green Bunny Jedis and Jedis in pink furry bikinis.
As for Big Two comics, I collect DC exclusively. However, with Disney/Marvel’s interests more vested in Star Wars due to films, I think this is the company with the will, the staff, and the industry insight to put out the best Star Wars book possible. IMO, the Aaron/Cassaday launch team far outshines Dark Horse’s A-list push with the Brian Wood book a few years ago. With Waid and Gillen writing the spin-offs, Star Wars is even getting more creative team love than DC’s flagship Justice League books (whose third book Justice League Dark suffers in the writing and art department).