Star Wars Comics Reviews Part 1: Russ Manning's Star Wars Daily Strip

Back in the Old Days, if you were an artist that worked in comics, you didn’t want to do a comic book: you wanted the high profile, prestige and visibility of a daily newspaper strip as opposed to the toiling obscurity of comic books. One of my favorite details in “Kavalier and Clay” is that doing comic books was a step above being a pornographer…but only barely! Strips were the ticket to the big time.

So color me surprised to discover the Star Wars daily comic strip in the late 1970s was plotted and drawn by old-school comic book guy and Korean war vet Russ Manning, creator of Magnus: Robot Fighter. Apparenty he was going to retire but instead went back to comics simply because he loved the movie Star Wars that much. Now that’s passion!

And what can I say? It’s gorgeous alright, classy and old-school cool, Russ Manning brought his A-Game. He’s the only comics artist I can think of that draws Darth Vader in a way that feels “right” to me, that draws Storm Troopers in a frightening way. He’s a master of monsters and machines. As for his Luke Skywalker and Leia, his drawings look like Luke and Leia, though they look nothing like Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher! If that makes sense.


However, I can’t help but shake the feeling that Manning should have worked with a plotter on this, someone that understands Star Wars, like Archie Goodwin. For one thing, Star Wars is so lively because of the characters. I can’t think of one line of dialogue that Han Solo would say, with his distinct swagger and smarminess. Luke was a hero and audience identification figure, but he was also reckless, “fast and bumpy,” and was always spoiling for action. I can't think of one time in the daily those characteristics were on display.


I guess that’s my overall verdict: Russ Manning was a godlike artist at the top of his game who may have been the most beautiful Star Wars comics artist except for maybe Walt Simonson or Duursema, but in terms of plotting and character he was past his prime, developing as a writer in an era that didn’t value characterization or unpredictability. In that sense he reminds me of Otto Binder and yes, even Jack Kirby and Chris Claremont these days anyway: once-great creators who stopped being relevant when comics changed and they didn’t. Though to his credit, Manning always kept his dignity and didn’t descend into Otto Binder foolishness; Manning’s plots were predictable but clean and correct.

(In fact, I always thought of Jack Kirby after Marvel as very similar to George Lucas: he receives more than his fair share of credit for something that was a collaborative effort and when he works on his own and calls the shots, he delivers something weird and ugly. In fact, the Fourth World was Kirby’s Episode I: highly anticipated like nothing else. There was even talk the Fourth World was going to be a “Marvel-Killer.” Ultimately, it was a giant Episode I-esque creative disappointment. Episode I words like “disappointment” and “shock” can describe practically everything Kirby did during and after the 1970s. His much-touted return to Captain America without Simon or Lee featured weird and ugly stuff like the doughboy and the madbomb.)

Russ Manning also broke the one great unspoken no-no of Star Wars when he made some insufferable little kid a part of the story, for which I want to choke the life out of him with my bare hands. The greatest thing about Star Wars was there were no little kids running around. Little kids are unfortunately common in adventure comics prior to 1950, and they’re all terrible. Not some of them…all of them. It’s unfortunate Manning had to export the bad habit of little kids to a comic like Star Wars where it doesn’t belong. I’ve never understood the reasoning behind making a kid a part of something aimed at kids. Imaginations don’t work that way. Kids dream about and pretend to be heroes like Batman or Han Solo, or bad guys of a grand and terrible type like Darth Vader or the Joker, precisely because they’re not kids. I have no idea what went into the decision to make kids the main characters of Star Wars phenomena like the forgettable Jedi Prince books and the various Ewok TV specials.

Star Wars was something kids loved, but precisely because it was never childish. People were killed in Star Wars, something the movies never covered up. This, by the way, is why people were so offended by “Greedo shot first.” So it blows my mind to see Manning’s strip actually do Comics Code stuff like have the bad guy get “accidentally killed by a ricochet.” What, he couldn’t have “tripped and fallen into his own deathtrap,” the preferred ironic means of death for Doc Savage villains? Bad guys have to die because of poetic justice for the awful things they’ve done, but the “fall into your own deathtrap” accident leaves the good guys’ hands lily-white. Somehow, I don’t think Han Solo would either a) have any qualms about blasting a lowlife Imperial officer Nazi type, or b) miss.

The Bad Guys

The Star Wars strips were responsible for giving us a bad guy that became a big figure in the expanded universe: Blackhole, a creepy, memorable villain that moved like a shadow. There were some other bad guys too. One of the more surprising was an Imperial Officer who was a sort of snake-alien. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Imperial Officer other than Thrawn to be a non-human. A big part of Star Wars lore is that the Empire was racist and classist, and officers were from the aristocratic classes and were never derived from the rabble of the enlisted men. This was probably due to the fact that as the Star Wars movies were all filmed in England, most of the non-principal cast brought from the States were English actors. Anyway, it’s an old Hollywood habit to hire Brits to play Nazis in war movies, which Star Wars kept, since it was all basically World War II in space.

I always thought this was one of the more unusual things about Star Wars: the bad guys were white and upper-class, as opposed to villains that are malevolent because they’re vaguely ethnic. Offhand I can’t think of any other science fiction group were this was done. Even the Klingons in the otherwise progressive Star Trek were swarthy types, typically played by Greek, Jewish or Italian actors (and black actors in the Next Generation on).

Russ Manning’s Cheesecake

The Star Wars expanded universe operates under the hilarious conceit that Luke Skywalker would get more female action than the cooler Han Solo or Lando Calrissian, and the Manning comics are no exception to that unbelievable rule. All of the girls teamed up with Luke and “liked him.”

Science fiction comics have always been sold under the va-va-voom factor, and pay no attention to Calvinist hypocrites that say otherwise. Heck, to anyone that tries to argue that comics fandom has gotten hornier and dumber over the years, I’d offer as my rebuttal pretty much any given lettercol for the original Planet Comics: all the letters pages talked about was who the hottest space babe in the book. I’m not kidding, read them for yourself. They’re as unpredictable as a stable-hand’s hidden passions.


In fact, Russ Manning even used a G-rated version of one of Star Wars’s favorite plots: the Star Wars “It Girl,” Princess Leia, becomes a slave girl. They did this in a much more famous way with the slave bikini in “Return of the Jedi,” which got a cover in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and was also a plot point in Alan Dean Foster’s novel “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.”

Steve Englehart writer profile in 1973 issue of "Vampirella"

Now this was an interesting find: in Vampirella Magazine #22, there's a writer profile on arguably comics's greatest genius, "Stainless" Steve Englehart, in 1973, the very height of his early career.

As an Englehart-aficionado, this hagiography doesn't tell me anything I don't already know (except for the fact that Englehart, along with Marvel-horror guys like Don Glut and Marv Wolfman worked on the Warren Publications Vampirella mag), but other people may find the story surprising: Stainless started off in comics while in the army, after meeting Neal Adams and becoming an inker for him, and then becoming an assistant editor and then scripter.

Warren Publications always had the brassiest comics reporting; they were always pull no punches and raw, and tell a counter-story to the 'official events.' They always, always published letters with strong and dissenting points of view, even ones that make the company look bad. They published letters that said that Vampirella and her sexpot ways was pretty much for male chauvanists; they published letters arguing that Vampirella was lame because of her science fiction elements. In short, Vampirella letters pages were the liveliest and argumentative I have ever seen ever published, and they have never entirely been replaced.

Julian Perez vs. the Fifties

If the fifties were a planet, it would be a papier-mache crust over a core of vacuum.

Venus

Now, I'm unlikely to ever win an award for totally understanding women any time soon, but it occurs to me that fiction aimed at women usually has the heroine as a scrappy underdog, like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, or a spunky ordinary girl, like Anne of Green Gables or Pippi Longstocking. The idea of setting a series around the premise that the heroine is the loveliest creature in existence sounds unbelievably alienating.

I have no idea what the target audience is for this. The women thing was a guess because of the comic's mostly relationship humor and the fact it's set inside of a fashion magazine, but like I said, this doesn't sound like a concept that would be appealing to women. It's not for guys either, the way that say, the jungle girls or Bill Ward's Torchy Todd are, because Venus is hardly a jack-off fantasy for American GIs drawn in loving and horny detail. And I fail to see how kids would find the love, jealousy and working-girl comedy at all appealing.

I mean, I always hated stories where characters have only sympathetic flaws, like a sweet or nice girl that has a stutter or is in a wheelchair, where the flaw is used in a very cheap way to get us on the side of a character....but this is worse, because the problem she faces aren't problems in the conventional sense.

Worst of all, the "villain" of the story has a point. Venus has no qualifications and she comes in off the street and is promoted to the editor position of a beauty magazine. I'd hate her too, especially if I worked my duff off to get where I was.

One of the weirdest parts about Venus is that, as a book written by Stan Lee, towards the end the book undergoes a metamorphosis from office humor and becomes a dress rehearsal for Silver Age Thor. Like Silver Age Thor, the stories were centered around an immortal that had a forbidden love for a mortal earthling of modern times, a figure that nobody really believed was actually a god. And in both series, there was a haughty Big Kahuna god that didn't like the main character messing around and insisted they return. And finally, both have a main villain named Loki - and in both versions, he's a demonic god of evil that has horns (though in the case of Venus, he's drawn identical to the Devil).

Captain Science

I read this one as soon as I could because I am a huge fan of Wally Wood. Unlike "THUNDER Agents," here though it seems like Wood is just phoning it in for a paycheck.

One of the frustrating things about being a comics fan sometimes is that as everybody's such an insanely nitpicky nerd, and somebody somewhere is a hardcore fan of say, Donald Glut's "Dagar the Invincible" and "Tragg and the Sky Gods," it's very rare and ridiculously difficult to have a new revelation or a new insight, especially into really storied characters where everything that can be discovered about them has been discovered.

Here's something that I don't think any aficionados of classic comics have ever pointed out before: the similarities between the origin of the Silver Age Green Lantern (who debuted in 1959) and Wally Wood's Captain Science (who debuted in 1951).

Both heroes have their origin start off with a bald alien with an unusual skin color that crash-lands in the New Mexico desert. Before they die, the aliens give the hero an item of power. In the case of Captain Science, the alien's teaching machines give him all sorts of knowledge of scientific fact unknown to earth.

The Yellow Claw

Sorry to say the obvious here...but Good God, that was racist!

The revival of the Yellow Claw in modern Marvel Comics, including a really memorable story by Englehart (take a shot!) and a few other great ones including a tale where he actually killed the Mandarin (and he was really dead, too, though he came back to life when he placed his mind in his rings and some poor sap tried them on) made me very curious about the character and his 1950s origins.

The first issue with the Yellow Claw were well-plotted, atmospheric thrillers with extraordinary art. It definitely had strengths as a concept, though it was extremely derivative. Every panel looked like an extremely elaborate Chinese restaurant placemat. The next three stories were more or less Challengers of the Unknown stories: centered around a single weird occurrence, like a whole building where gravity reversed itself.