Tuesday, 25 April 2017

1994: CLASSIC STAR WARS VOLUME 1 - UK EDITION

From 1994: the first of the CLASSIC STAR WARS trade paperbacks, published in the UK by Boxtree (the masters of flooding the market with quick-and-dirty reprints).

IDW is about to publish a classy compilation volume of the STAR WARS NEWSPAPER STRIPS... so Marvel NY beat them to market by issuing their own trade paperback compilation of the old Dark Horse series from the early Nineties... which (heavily) reworked the US newspaper strips (which i don't think ever had an outing on this side of the Atlantic) into comic book format.

The strips - both original and reworked versions - have, until this year, languished untouched for several decades.  But the return of the movie series, and Marvel's energised publishing programme, has obviously renewed interest.

The new Marvel book is a curious mix of some of the pages reworked by DH and some - previously unpublished - strips in their original 'newspaper' format.  I'm assuming the IDW effort will preserve the strips as they were originally intended/ published.  Let the comparisons begin.

Boxtree published three volumes (that I know of) of the DM monthly series way-back-when.  Some of the strips also appeared in the short-lived Dark Horse International published UK monthly.  Which shuttered after less than a year.

The strips also appeared in the earliest issues of the US magazine AMAZING HEROES.



2 comments:

  1. Hi! The Star Wars colour strips were published in the UK in the Sunday Express magazine in the early-mid 80s. I cut and collected a good few of them.

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  2. on the subject of star wars re-prints, does Jeph York's project involve re-printing the classic marvel tales or is it for supplementary material as per the Transformers uk volumes ?

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