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neilrcoulter's review
4.0
I know—it seems like I've hit rock bottom, reading a reissue of an Ewoks comic book from the mid-1980s. You may believe that I need an intervention. But hear me out. Back in the years during and just after the original Star Wars trilogy, the "canon" was a strange and wonderful place. This was long before any notion of "everything is canon" or of SW being an intricately interconnected fictional world. The whole galaxy was up for grabs, and as a result, the books and comics of that era are a lot of bizarre, silly fun.
A beautiful case in point is the recent reissues of the original SW daily newspaper comics, which are better at conveying the fun, adventurous tone of the original movies than almost anything that's being written now in the new canon. These stories make little sense, there is almost no sense of mythological weight—and yet I love them.
This reissue is very much the same. The original Ewoks comics were published around the same time as the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon (which showed along with the Droids cartoon). The cartoon was silly, and the comic book matches that. In this version of SW, the forest moon of Endor boasts a surprising number of different landscapes and climates. And the Ewoks themselves face near-constant danger, from lizard people, swamp monsters, ogres, rogue Ewoks gone bad, and visiting space pirates eager to claim Endor's resources for their own. There are grown-up Ewoks in the tribe, but most problems are discovered and conquered by a trio of Ewok children: Wicket, Teebo, and Princess Kneesa. The stories sometimes include magical elements, they nearly always feature unbelievable escapes, and the sound design would be better served by Looney Tunes sound effects than anything more typical of SW.
It's awesome.
Very little in the current SW canon (movies, books, graphic novels) takes me back to what SW felt like when I was a kid, but these old comics bring it all rushing back. They're wonderful and terrible, and I'm glad they're still available, as a record of that fantastic time.
A beautiful case in point is the recent reissues of the original SW daily newspaper comics, which are better at conveying the fun, adventurous tone of the original movies than almost anything that's being written now in the new canon. These stories make little sense, there is almost no sense of mythological weight—and yet I love them.
This reissue is very much the same. The original Ewoks comics were published around the same time as the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon (which showed along with the Droids cartoon). The cartoon was silly, and the comic book matches that. In this version of SW, the forest moon of Endor boasts a surprising number of different landscapes and climates. And the Ewoks themselves face near-constant danger, from lizard people, swamp monsters, ogres, rogue Ewoks gone bad, and visiting space pirates eager to claim Endor's resources for their own. There are grown-up Ewoks in the tribe, but most problems are discovered and conquered by a trio of Ewok children: Wicket, Teebo, and Princess Kneesa. The stories sometimes include magical elements, they nearly always feature unbelievable escapes, and the sound design would be better served by Looney Tunes sound effects than anything more typical of SW.
It's awesome.
Very little in the current SW canon (movies, books, graphic novels) takes me back to what SW felt like when I was a kid, but these old comics bring it all rushing back. They're wonderful and terrible, and I'm glad they're still available, as a record of that fantastic time.
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