By Pablo Hidalgo
Manga vs. Marvel -- it's truly an unfair comparison to gauge how well Marvel Comics originally adapted the classic trilogy films against how Japanese artists did the same. The deck is definitely stacked in manga's favor. For the Marvel adaptations, produced during each film's post-production period, the artists had not seen the films -- they were working merely from the script, with some key photography and maybe some concept art. Also, they had to conform to the page and printing standards of newsstand comics from 1977-1983. This meant that all the action of a Star Wars film had to be crammed into six issues (or, in the case of Return of the Jedi, a mere four).
Japanese manga has a much more flexible format and page count to accommodate a more deliberate and varied pace of storytelling. Since the Japanese manga versions did not come out until 1997, the artists benefited from years of studying the flow and dynamics of the movies.
This list isn't really meant to be a competition; instead it's a contrast at how different cultures approach the same subject matter in graphically illustrated form. What follows are key moments of the Star Wars trilogy as presented in Japanese manga by Media Works in 1997, placed next to moments as already interpreted by Marvel writers and artists.
Please note that the manga pages presented here are their original Japanese incarnation, with the action playing out right-to-left. When Dark Horse Comics translated the manga editions to English, they had to, by necessity, flip the imagery so that it read left-to-right.
