Star Wars: Lightspeed comics, 1984
In my article on To Hunt a Jedi, I introduced you to my very own Star Wars fanzine, titled Lightspeed. By the time I got around to conceiving it, I was lucky enough to have made some local friends who, like me, were burning to one day draw comics for a living. Two of them were interested enough in Star Wars to take me up on my invitation to contribute.
The first of these two stories was written and drawn by a fella named Dave Gifford, who speculated on what Darth Vader got up to right after the destruction of Death Star 1. I met Dave when we both took the same Comic Book Production class from instructor Mike Gustovich (in Grand Rapids, Michigan) back in late 1980/early 81. Dave was easily the most energetic guy in the group, ready to make it on momentum alone.
Creating this comic put a spark in him to do some more, but a few months afterward he came to the conclusion that he could either make comics or put that energy into his Christian faith. Comics lost. Which meant, in a way, we all did too. I can’t find any evidence online of Dave’s re-entry into the field, so maybe this is the last of his works. I would love to be wrong about that.
The second strip was by Andrew Pepoy, who was also a graduate of the Mike Gustovich classes, and is very definitely still active in comics today. He wrote and drew it to return a favor, since I drew some pages for one of his small press mini-comics in the early 80s. I then had the pleasure of getting him one of his first professional assignments, inking a 4-issue Alien Nation miniseries I drew for Adventure Comics in 1990/91 (see it here).
He went on to work for a bunch of different publishers and develop his own original title, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax. Find out about that and more at his website here.
