Luke Skywalker is sent on an undercover mission to wipe out an Imperial port, and all his Jedi skills are put to the test by a new enemy he never expected to face! With this story, my "kid comic" years culminated with me publishing my very own Star Wars fanzine! See it here!

Most of what I've presented in this section of ArtValt has been one-off comic stories of one kind or another. This page rounds up a mishmash of Star Wars projects drawn during my fanzine years, including my second parody comic of the first movie, drawn when I was 18.

Shortly before Return of the Jedi arrived, my mindset inexplicably shifted from Star Wars to Indiana Jones. I'd already drawn plenty of Han Solo stories and a Blade Runner tale, so I thought maybe I could tack another Harrison Ford merit badge onto my uniform.

Return of the Jedi gave me a lot of new elements to factor in, and I had the pleasure of drawing some characters and mecha for the first time. Now that Luke/Vader confrontations had an endpoint, the continuity for pre-Jedi stories was completely clear, and this would end up being my last one set in that time frame.

1982 was the year that truly paid off the gambles taken by Lucas and Spielberg in the 70s. In just a short, 4-month period, we got more A-level fantasy and SF movies than we'd ever seen before. For me, the one that rose above all the others was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. It got so deep into my bloodstream that it had to come out as a fanzine comic.

Imperial TIE fighters strike the rebel fleet out of nowhere in a surprise attack? How did they get through, and who let it happen? This was the tenth Star Wars fanzine comic I drew since jumping into the pool in late 1981, and the first to sort of get me into trouble. Find out how here...

Splinter of the Mind's Eye presented the irresistible concept of a super-crystal that embodies The Force. Such a thing would grant God Power to its user. With this fanzine comic, I decided to take that idea across a line of no return.

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.