Friday 24 November 2023

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...


Characters copyright MARVEL COMICS and relevant and respective owners

I know I had Star Wars Weekly #71 when it first came out in 1979 because I cut off the cover and affixed the Princess Leia section to one of my bedroom walls.  Well, I actually used Evo-Stik to glue it to the wall - and there it stayed for around four years before we flitted to another house in another neighbourhood.  The picture was ruined beyond repair when I tried to remove it, so it didn't adorn my new room for the just over four years my family and myself lived in that new house.  Nor did it when we moved back to our previous home as it never made it out of there to begin with.  It was absent for around 35 years until I saw the cover on the Internet and copied it, enlarged it, and then returned a print-out of it to pretty much the same spot on the wall it had previously occupied.  It was good to see her there again.

The image you see above is from a replacement copy I received yesterday, having bought it via eBay just a few days before.  Apart from the first couple of interior pages, I remember nothing of the contents*, making me think that I had only purchased my original copy primarily so I could use the cover as a poster, as I thought the pic of Princess Leia was pretty hot.  I don't think I was buying the comic after the early issues, certainly not into the later numbers of which this is one, which tends to confirm (for me) that it was bought just for the cover.  I was therefore surprised to see a Tales Of The Watcher strip in my new copy that I have absolutely no memory of seeing 44 years ago - or at any other time.  I thought it was a nice little story so decided to share it with you here, as a reward for you having to dredge through my weary personal reminiscence.

So enjoy the story - and also that alluring Carmine Infantino drawing of the princess with the red-hot bod!  And feel free to leave a comment - I'll be watching (for I am The A Watcher).

******

*I'd owned the original US presentations of Warlock and Guardians of course, but their inclusion in the UK SWW had obviously eluded my memory so many years after the fact.  (And maybe even not too long after buying it and removing the cover.) 










2 comments:

Colin Jones said...

I remember that cover very well because my father saw it and said "She didn't look like that in the film!"

I also remember the Watcher story which was completely clueless about science. It's set in the Year 3000 when the Earth is getting colder and colder because the Sun is getting dimmer as if it was a lump of coal. In actual fact the Sun is getting slowly hotter and Earth will be totally uninhabitable in about a billion years. Around five billion years from now the Sun will expand into a "Red Giant" star and probably swallow up the Earth. I already knew all these facts when I read that Watcher story in Star Wars Weekly!

Kid said...

CJ, the 'facts' of which you speak are only speculation which nobody can know will happen or not. Five billion years from now is a long way away and nobody can really have a scooby what will happen then. And it's quite logical to assume (for the purpose of a story) that a great big ball of fire will eventually cool down over time as that's what usually happens with fire in the here and now. Maybe it'll get extra hot before cooling down, but it's anyone's guess. If scientists were so reliable, they wouldn't have to revise their theories and textbooks every few years. And remember, although you read this story in 1979, it was a reprint from the '60s when perhaps there was a different take on things regarding the sun.

And your dad was right - Princess Leia didn't look like that in the film. What was George Lucas thinking of, for goodness sake?!



Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...