When the "Thrawn trilogy" novels came out from '91 to '93, West End did a sourcebook for each one of them. I was lucky enough to land an assignment for the final one. It came to me in the midst of my best years as a comic book artist, when I was regularly inking my own work and feeling good about the results.

My sixth assignment from West End Games was a modest one, but exciting. Once in a while, they'd come out with a sourcebook tie-in to a separate Star Wars project. This one adapted and expanded material from the Han Solo novels by Brian Daley. I finally got to draw everyone's favorite piece'a junk and visualize some of the things that previously existed only as words in those baffling noves.

The illustrations that appeared in this volume were originally drawn for The Politics of Contraband. My guess is that the content for that book was overproduced, and some of it got diverted into this one. The environment is a trader/smuggler route called the Kira Run, and the book contains seven different playable adventures. My work was used for two of them.

This adventure was about smugglers taking jobs that got them in over their head, which apparently happens all the time in the Star Wars galaxy. I was the solo artist on the book (nyuk nyuk), so I got to design a gang of reprobates and put them through their paces.

For my third go-round with West End Games, the scenario for the adventure was quite different. Instead of a backwater planet, this one was set on an industrial and cultural center, a busy city planet that we wouldn’t see on film until the prequels and sequels arrived.

I was the sole artist assigned to this book, so I was entrusted with the task of designing the characters and environment: a race of amphibians, an Imperial Swamp Trooper, a method of docking for TIE fighters, and a pair of female mercenaries who I subconsciously thought of as the Star Wars version of Japan’s Dirty Pair.

In 1991, I figured out how to turn my Star Wars fandom into freelance income. Planets of the Galaxy, Volume 1 was my first West End Games assignment, and it was a good one to start with. The books in this 3-volume series presented gamers with new planets on which to plot their adventures, none of which had been established in the original trilogy.