With the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con International just getting underway, it seems appropriate to reflect on the historical relationship between Star Wars and the comic book community. As many are aware, Star Wars enjoyed incredible success in comic book form, a legacy that has been well documented and thoroughly mined by Expanded Universe enthusiasts and continuity watchdogs.
But the story seldom told is how Star Wars was both influenced by and directly marketed to the comic book community during the formative years of 1976 and '77. Star Wars had, in fact, been developed in part because Lucas was unable to secure the rights to do a feature based on the old Flash Gordon comics and serials. Undeterred, he opted to create his own universe instead, maintaining the spirit of the genre but upgrading the experience to the status of myth.
In a decade that was still dealing with repercussions of the Vietnam War and with audiences fed a steady diet of gritty cynicism through films and television, Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz realized early on that no traditional campaign formula would apply to Star Wars. Such a unique property required a different approach. Charles Lippincott, who had years earlier cultivated a relationship with Lucas at USC based on their shared love of film and comic books, was brought on to help promote the fledgling Star Wars production in the fall of 1975. Lippincott, like Lucas and Kurtz, immediately recognized the need to campaign the film by unconventional means, a task Lippincott came well prepared for.
In 1970, Lippincott had performed a series of film lectures at the University of California at San Diego in which he used comic book pages to demonstrate the various techniques of shot sequencing. "I used Marvel Comics," explains Lippincott, "particularly Gene Colan's Dracula, because he did a center spread in one of them which had Dracula going from a bat to a man in several panels. It was a very dynamic, very filmic piece." The novelty of using comic books to illustrate film caught the attention of Shel Dorf, who had helped found the San Diego Comic-Con that same year. He asked if Lippincott would be interested in attending. "I didn't really get what he was talking about," admits Lippincott. "When he said Comic-Con, I didn't connect that 'con' meant convention. I didn't dismiss him, it just wasn't something I was into at the time or was going to do anything with. But I thought it was all rather fascinating -- it sort of got put into the back of my mind."
Five years later, with a need to market a film that counted comic books among its many influences, Lippincott remembered the meeting. "When Star Wars came along, there was more talk about the comic book world, and I was more aware of the comic conventions. San Diego was growing, and comic conventions, just like science fiction conventions, were starting to get some notice. It was the one way of contacting what I felt was our key audience."
Deciding that the burgeoning comic book fan community would make the perfect seed bed for planting buzz about Star Wars, Lippincott set out to license a quality comic book series of the film. In January 1976, Lippincott went to New York to meet with Marvel's Stan Lee, who cooly received the idea of doing a Star Wars comic without the film yet released. Determined to sign a reputable publisher such as Marvel on to Star Wars early on, though, Lippincott was able to get a lunch meeting with Marvel editor/writer Roy Thomas through a contact of Lucas'. Thomas was well known at the time for writing/editing Marvel's Conan and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction comics series, so if he could be convinced, Lippincott was sure he could sway Lee. Over lunch, Lippincott shared a handful of McQuarrie's early production paintings with Thomas, who was notably impressed. "If you do it," he told Lippincott, "I want to edit and write them." Lippincott was happy to oblige given Thomas' talented reputation, and the two met with Lee the next day.
"Basically, Stan made this hardball deal," remembers Lippincott, "that they would do the Star Wars comic book, but we wouldn't get paid for the first 100,000 copies." This was agreeable, said Lippincott, if Marvel agreed to start selling the comic several months before the film came out as a six-issue mini-series rather than the traditional two-issue set for a film-to-comic adaptation. Lee acquiesced. "They thought, 'Oh, have we put one over on this bozo,'" laughs Lippincott.
Lucas and Kurtz, both comic book aficionados themselves, were extremely pleased that Lippincott was able to negotiate a deal with Marvel. Twentieth Century Fox, however, who traditionally didn't use comic books to market movies, just didn't get it. "You made a comic book deal? So what?" Lippincott was told. "And you're not getting paid for it? What good is that?" Lippincott was confident he'd made a strategic victory with the Marvel deal, though, and getting the comic released before the film would prove crucial to the campaign in the months just prior to the film's debut.
