Ready for some hard-hitting social satire? From the mind of a 17-year old? Well, look elsewhere. Because this story isn't that. I thought it was at the time, though. And nobody ever told me it wasn't. So maybe you decide.

Of all the Star Wars comics I created back in the fanzine days, this one is my absolute favorite. It was effortless to write, as if it came together all by itself, and had just the right balance of light and heavy moments. Rough edges notwithstanding, it seemed as solid to me as anything Marvel was doing. Plus, it featured a bounty hunter. I loved those guys.

Rebel pilots must escort critical supplies from a planet's rings down to their embattled base on the surface, forcing them to thread a deadly needle to avoid Imperial attacks. How will they do it? And what valuable lessons did this story teach me about the craft of storytelling? Find the answers to those and other questions in this article.

If I had one super power as a teenager (outside of writing and drawing), it was the ability to conjure up a Star Wars story from just about anything. Here's what happens when you pull a story out of a magic combination of Star Wars toys.

This one is LOADED with memories for me. First and foremost, it's another bounty hunter story. As my record will attest, I was fascinated by the bounty hunters since the first sighting of Boba Fett in 1978. When that rogue's gallery appeared for the first time in Empire, it was like Uncle George was handing me story ideas. There was a tale to be told about each of them, and this comic was one of those tales. ALSO: lucky special bonus comic inside!

This was my fourth Star Wars comic written and drawn for a fanzine in April 1982, when I was 16. It was published in Crossed Sabers (Vol. 2, issue 3) in 1983. At the time I drew it, Return of the Jedi was a little over away, so in my head the rebel alliance was still in a Battlestar Galactica scenario, creeping through space toward whatever was to come. And space is always full of weird hazards.

Luke Skywalker and an Imperial pilot crash-land on an uncharted planet, where mutual survival forces them into a temporary truce. They are forced into much more when they find a city of persecuted droids massing to retaliate against the entire galaxy! This was my third Star Wars story created for fanzine publication, written and drawn from January to March, 1982 (at age 16).

From the exploits of Han Solo: Han and Chewie are stalked through a big city by the toughest, meanest bounty hunter this side of Boba Fett! This was one of the earliest Star Wars comics I drew for a fanzine, and it predated a lot of later Bossk appearances that seemed to be cut from the same cloth.

This was one of my first comics to be published in a fanzine, a comedic story set in an open-source world created by my first friend in SF fandom, Cathy Ford. The stakes were low and no heavy lifting was required. All it had to be was entertaining.

The story of how I found my people in the world of SF fandom AND found a way to finally get my Star Wars comics to an audience, both of which happened on the same day in the same place! (Plus a complete comic story as a lucky special bonus.)

If you've even glanced through the "kid comics" section of ArtValt, you may have been impressed by the number of projects I carried all the way to the finish line as a youngster. To balance the scales, this collection rounds up five separate homemade Star Wars comics that didn't reach their respective finales for one reason or another.

Pursued by a sadistic Imperial admiral, Luke, Leia, and the droids take shelter on a neutral planet where they both find old acquaintances on opposite sides of the conflict. But the empire is ready to bring this refuge down on all of them! I took a LOT of creative steps forward with my third Star Wars graphic novel, created in the summer of 1981 when I was 16.

This tale was inspired by a couple different sources: the original Battlestar Galactica (specifically the Fire in Space episode) and a summary for a sci-fi story (I think) in which a spaceship had to maintain a specific weight to reach a destination at a specific time. Any idea that would spark another Star Wars comic was fine by me.

Here's something I figured out as a fantasy/SF/comic book writer: there are certain cliches you have to work out of your system before anyone will take you seriously. See if you can guess which one I got out of my system with this story.

I plunged into this graphic novel at 15 years old, setting out to create the best Abominable Snowman story ever told, direct a horror movie on paper (with no adult relationship experience), and play with a different storytelling format. Did all comic book pages have to have the same kind of panel layouts? I didn't think so. I still don't.

This was a huge, sprawling adventure story with fun, diverse characters thrown together in a chase-quest. It would have all the things that make a kid say "aw, cool": heroes, aliens, monsters, spaceships, battles, robots, and dinosaurs. The kind of story 15-year-old-me would devour. There weren't enough of them around to satisfy me, so (as usual) I had to make my own.

Luke Skywalker vs. Boba Fett in a race to find a lost city! My second full-length Star Wars graphic novel, made when I was a high school Sophomore. And it represented a pretty big turning point, due entirely to me getting some actual hands-on education.

After a gap of almost two years, I returned to the space heroes I didn't know were inspired by anime robots and threw everything I had against them in two brain-shattering comic book epics that shook the universe! Don't worry if you missed them, they've been waiting for you to catch up ever since!

My first graphic novel! Ever since 1977, the Rebel Alliance had been firmly planted on the moon of Yavin, but as The Empire Strikes Back approached in 1980, we found out that was going to change. As this story opens, the exodus has begun...and is about to get significantly more urgent.

Sometimes I spontaneously took on a project to see if it could be done. Using a cassette recording taken off the TV, I would draw a comic book version of the ENTIRE FILM. Every scene, every line, exactly as spoken. It was going to be a Christmas gift for my sister, and I had less than a month to get it done. You MUST be wondering how this crazy plan worked out...