I have no specific memory whatever of that meeting, but I must have been nearly as convincing verbally as I'd been in my 1970 memo to original Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, the one that persuaded him to actually shell out money to license rights to a sword-and-sorcery hero. Conan the Barbarian's eventual success probably helped me this time around. Maybe I made a good case for the Star Wars comic getting us into space-opera heroics as Conan had into barbarian derring-do. Or maybe Stan just wanted to humor me, since the comic rights would be basically free for those six issues.

Stan himself, whose memory about such matters (by his own admission) is generally just this side of amnesiac, has said since that he was sold on the idea the second time around because Alec Guinness was starring in it. And maybe Guinness hadn't been mentioned when Stan had been approached. (I've no idea whether Charley and Ed had talked to Stan a day, a week, or longer before they approached me.) Still, adapting a movie into a comic because Alec Guinness was in it would hardly have been a logical move. His name had no marquee value to Marvel's readers.

At any rate, by the end of my meeting with Stan, I'd gained myself an assignment to write (and edit, so there'd be no one at Marvel besides Stan himself who could overrule me on any creative decisions) an adaptation of the Star Wars screenplay, which I had insisted must be five or six issues long. I felt it would take that space to tell the story of a 130-page screenplay with the proper pacing. I'd always felt the old Dell movie adaptations, squeezed into one issue of maybe 32 pages, were far too short to catch the feel of most movies. The artist, whoever he would be, would be able to utilize such photo stills as George's West Coast office could make available to us. And, since I was just a few months away from moving into a Hollywood-area apartment complex that was only a five-minute drive from Lucas' offices, which were still on the Universal Pictures lot (because of American Graffiti), everything should go like clockwork.

Sure it would. It always does, doesn't it?