My Ten Favorite Star Wars Comic Book Covers of the Marvel Era
In the last two plus decades Dark Horse Comics has published more Star Wars comic books (Amazon.com search*) than I care to count. Many, many fantastic titles have been released, and Dark Horse can hold its head high when the license closes at the end of the year. Awesome work, Dark Horse! You’ve been a great guardian of Star Wars in comic book stores.
But when it comes to Star Wars comics that snatch my imagination and bring back memories it has to be the Marvel Star Wars comics of the seventies and eighties. Arguably a lot of the Dark Horse comic work was better than Marvel’s, but you can’t beat those old comics for sparking excitement when I was a kid.
In celebration of May the Fourth I now present my ten favorite Star Wars comic book covers of the Marvel era. These are presented in release order and not in order of preference; I had enough trouble narrowing things down to these ten and would have been here forever if I’d tried to rank these.
#68 is one of the best, indeed.
On another note, I’ve always found Marvel’s tendency to A: send Luke gallivanting around the galaxy in his moisture farmer work-clothes, and B: refer to Luke/Leia/Han/Chewie/etc as “The Star Warriors” to be hilarious.
@Jester – It was really tough not to pick ten Carmine Infantino covers and move on. I think the teens, twenties, and thirties of the run had the most excitement and energy.
And yeah, “The Star Warriors” was a lot of fun. I suspect we don’t see that in Marvel’s Star Wars comics next year. But I wish we would.
Just as long as they don’t force poor Skywalker to do all his star-hopping in a linen wrap-shirt (oddly, Dark Horse has been doing this lately).
I’ve always fancied the gold-jacketed ensemble as the go-to “adventuring” outfit for Luke post-ANH and pre-ESB, personally (it did get a bit of play back in the day, but not nearly enough).