ANOTHER STAR
WARS CLASSIC:
Writer/Editor ARCHIE GOODWIN
Interview by Jim Morrow
6/9/96
Archie Goodwin is
a Star Wars veteran from way back. He is credited with writing perhaps the finest
original Star Wars comics to date, beginning with his tenure as the SW
writer in issue #11 of the Marvel Comics' series. He continued through Marvel's adaptation
of The Empire Strikes Back, when he was able to team up with artist Al Williamson.
They re-teamed for Marvel's Return of the Jedi adaptation, and again in the Star
Wars syndicated newspaper strip, recently reprinted by Dark Horse Comics as Classic Star
Wars.
Jim Morrow, who has been recapping the Marvel Comics run of Star Wars for ECHO STATION, caught up with Mr. Goodwin in his office at DC Comics for this insider s look at the making of a Star Wars comic.
ECHO STATION: How did you become the editor for the Star Wars comic? Was it by choice or by accident?
ARCHIE GOODWIN: Kind of by accident. I was editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics when the STAR WARS comic began. Roy Thomas, a writer/editor working for the company and a former editor-in-chief himself, brought the Star Wars project to Marvel. Roy is really the one who should have all the credit for Marvel actually doing the STAR WARS comic. He had met with Lucasfilm s people out in California when they were looking for someone to do a Star Wars comic book. He was really intrigued by the material and suggested that Marvel could do it. He put a lot into getting the Marvel comic and adaptation up and running.
After the film adaptation ran in the book, Roy began a second adventure to keep the comic book going, and I think he found that he was not comfortable doing the material. By that time I had seen the film and was pretty enthralled by it. When Roy mentioned that he was thinking of giving up the book as writer and editor, I kind of unfairly abused my position as editor-in-chief and appointed my self as writer/editor of the book. My run began after a gross abuse of power on my part.
ES: At the time was Star Wars Marvel's hottest book?
AG: When the movie adaptation came out, it was an unheard of best seller. I don't think comic books had ever sold like that since the peak of their popularity in the World War Two, when Captain Marvel and Superman would occasionally have million issue sellers. But the Star Wars movie adaptation just sold and sold in a variety of formats. The first movie was just such a phenomenon that we were happy to get to share in that.
ES: Could you explain the process that was involved when you wanted to implement a new story idea? What kind of approval process did you need to adhere to?
AG: In the beginning I would send a synopsis of the story line I was planning to do to Lucasfilm and the folks in their licensing department would check over what I was doing. (I dealt with) a lady named Carol Titleman - practically a one person licensing department for Lucasfilm. Later on, as they hired more people, there would be an editor that I worked with and submitted material to... They got to where they could trust me enough that I could generally get the comic book done and submit the finished version for them to check over.
ES: That's quite a gesture of trust.
AG: It is, but this was not immediately. After a year or so... they became comfortable with me. Occasionally I would do a story that they would feel uncomfortable with and I might have to make changes.
It seems to me that the biggest issue was often the size of Princess Leia's breasts. Comic book artists, for whatever dark interest reasons, draw women with big breasts, just as they draw guys with big muscles. Its very hard to get that out of them. The Lucasfilm people would say "Y'know, Leia's not really that buxom." So we would go back and forth on that.
ES: I'm curious as to what limitations Lucasfilm set on your story lines. Were there any story ideas you wanted to explore but were not allowed to?
AG: Not really. Once I did a story line that kind of got into prejudice against droids.
ES: The "Valance The Hunter" Story line.
AG: Yeah. I think they felt that got a little heavy for Star Wars material. But I pointed out that in the Cantina scene when they say that droids aren't allowed here obviously there is some prejudice exhibited. They really didn't make me change it; they suggested that I shouldn't go quite so heavy with the material in the future. And I would try to write with that in mind.
ES: Speaking of Valance - he was probably one of the greatest tragic characters you came up with during the Marvel run. What was your inspiration for him?
AG: Mostly you've got a situation where you have a large cast of characters to deal with in Star Wars. And because they are characters that are put forth in another medium, you can t really do anything permanent with them. So to keep some sense of danger and undernote of tragedy to the material, from time to time you try to come up with interesting characters that at some point could perhaps die, if it suits the purpose of the story line. And I think that if you are doing an ongoing series, an adventure, you do have to - even if its a semi-lighthearted adventure - you still have to have a few dark elements to it to make the dangers seem more realistic and give a sense of mortality to it.
Obviously they do it in the first Star Wars movie with the death of Luke's Aunt and Uncle and the seeming death of Obi-Wan Kenobi. When you do this kind of material, you don't have the luxury of killing off any characters from the movie - that is the movie's providence and rightly so. So you try to think of characters you can do things with and weave into the story line and that's what I did with Valance.
ES: Was it more stressful to work for essentially two companies rather than the one you were used to? You had to come up with creative new story lines for Star Wars, have them approved first by Lucasfilm, and then the powers-that-be at Marvel. On top of that you were working under a deadline. Was it difficult to work for those two companies at the same time?
AG: Not particularly. Not any more difficult than working for any other comic book. It was just different, that's all. The Star Wars material was being published simultaneously in Great Britain... as a weekly comic. I had to do... the equivalent of two Star Wars books each month so that we would always have material for the British weekly. Actually, in the beginning that made the American book so far ahead in terms of inventory that it wasn't a big deal working on it.
ES: Did you use the same story lines for the British strip?
AG: Yeah. I would still do them as if they were all part of the same continuity. I think... we may have been left with a couple stories that haven't seen print in the U.S. book.
ES: How did you decide on the different personalities for the different characters you created?
AG: I tried to think what would fit logically in the Star Wars universe; what would contrast with the regular ongoing cast; what would fit the needs of the particular story I was working on. It was not according to plan or anything. It was trying to come up with characters that would be believable and would fit into the story line.
ES: "The Wheel" story line was particularly interesting - especially when you brought in the Tagge family. Was there any particular inspiration for the Tagge family?
AG: The Tagge family was mostly just a creation
because with Darth Vader and Tarkin long gone, I felt we needed ongoing villains we could
use and bring back on occasion. Creating a family like that seemed not out of line with
the movie and gave me a good source of villains. I think the villains get harder and
harder to come up with... by creating a family I could draw on as recurring villains, it
gives greater strength to the continuity and greater residence to the villains because
they don't always get killed and they even don't necessarily lose.
ES: Did you get to use them as much as you wanted? They were in a few issues....
AG: I think I sort of wrapped them up to a certain extent. I left a sister still usable and brought her back too, I believe, in the fiftieth issue. Its nice to have recurring villains, but if they recur too much, the readers get a little tired of them. So I think I gave the Tagge family its own run, but it s good to give the readers a conclusion to it, too.
ES: How did you feel when it came time to do the adaptation to The Empire Strikes Back, when you had the script from Empire in your lap?
AG: Ah, quite a bit of pressure. Fortunately the excitement of being able to go through all the visual files - by the time I was sent out to get the reference material, the principle photography with the live actors was done, so they had lots of stills - the excitement of seeing all the sets and sketches of what the special effects would include would kind of carry you through. But there is a nervous feeling of "Oh my God, this is the sequel to probably the most popular film ever made at that time" and you have to do a decent adaptation to it and not blow it. You've got to do it within a certain amount of time and not be late - that makes you nervous. I think the excitement of being the one to do it carries you through that.
There was also the comfort of knowing that I would be working with Al Williamson, an old friend that I've worked with over the years. He was absolutely the best Star Wars artist your could ever want to have. That makes it easier because you feel that whatever you do as a writer, you have an artist that will make it look great. He's also an artist that Lucasfilm kind of begged and pleaded for and always wanted to have do Star Wars material. There was that comfort factor in it as well.
ES: Was The Empire Strikes Back adaptation the largest project you ever attempted in terms of media importance?
AG: I would think so, although Return of the Jedi also was important because it wrapped up the trilogy. I also worked on an adaptation of Alien with the Heavy Metal people and Close Encounters (of the Third Kind), so by the time Empire came around I was an old hand at doing movie adaptations.
ES: Here is something I've wondered for years. After reading the script for Empire for the first time, how did you decide to connect the story line you had created for the main characters in the Marvel comic with the story line in Empire so that the two story lines flowed?
AG: Finally you get to see where the characters from the first movie were intended to go by the creator. Yeah, that's a problem and I don't think we solved it especially well. I tried to bring one of my big story lines to a close - the Tagge family- and then set up a nod of the hat to the beginning of Empire. But Marvel then rescheduled the publishing date and we had to run a filler Star Wars story just before the adaptation instead of the issue that I thought was going to precede it, so it wasn't done all that smoothly. The issue that I thought would precede the adaptation has a bounty hunter attempt to kill Han Solo - take a shot at him or something like that - kind of a nod to Empire where Han makes the decision to leave Hoth and then says something about the bounty hunter from Ord Mantel.
ES: What was the best part of being the editor of the hottest comic in the industry? Did you overdose on Star Wars?
AG: No, I don't think I really did. I wrote it for three years, which is longer than I've ever done anything. I enjoyed it. I think that by the time I moved on to other things, I had my fill for a while. After Return of the Jedi came out, I was actually relieved to step away from it because I knew it would be much harder to do. But that wasn't a major factor - my freelance writing just couldn't keep up with my duties as editor of Epic comics.
ES: How much lag time was there between the end of your run on the Star Wars comic and the beginning of the Star Wars newspaper strip?
AG: I believe we (Goodwin and artist Al Williamson) made the decision to do the comic strip in late '79 and at the same time I took a job with Marvel to edit a magazine called Epic Illustrated.
ES: Were there any different ideas that you tried in the strip that you didn't try in the comic?
AG: We made the decision to set the strip in the time period between the end of A New Hope and the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. So we had a pretty clearly defined Star Wars time frame in which to work. We didn't want to set the strip after The Empire Strikes Back for a few reasons: one of the characters is in a block of carbonite and that restricts dialogue; also, Al wanted to use Han Solo extensively. It would make doing story lines much more of a problem, because they (Lucasfilm) would never reveal ahead of time what was going to happen in the third movie. So for convenience sake and for Al's sake it made sense to set the strip before the second Star Wars movie.
That also gave me a chance to do some individual episodes giving some sense of where the strip was going. I could start explaining how the Rebel base moves, how they decided to go to Hoth and gradually, slowly, move the strip forward to there until we knew what the hell was going to happen to the characters in the second movie. We never had that in the comic book. The (comic) books were always set after the movie and you might be doing something that might be contradicted by the next film.
ES: Did you have to go through the same type of approval process with Lucasfilm for the newspaper strip that you did the comic?
AG: Yes. I sent a synopsis so they would have an idea of where I was going with the stuff. Once they saw what Al and I were doing, they were very good about not being on our backs. I would give them a vague idea of what we were doing and they would trust us.
ES: Were there any of the original characters that Lucas created that you particularly liked to write for?
AG: No, I think I liked to write for them all. Al's favorite character was Han Solo. Han is a terrific character to write. One of the real pleasures of doing Star Wars is that you've seen the actors handle the lines and what they bring to the characters. You can hear their voices in your head as you write and it makes it a lot easier to do dialogue when someone else has already defined characters for you.
I guess the toughest thing for me to write was the droids because they require more humor. If you have too much of the droids, they become annoying rather than amusing. I wish I had been able to do a little more with Leia. Even in terms of the movie, in some places she's not as quite as interesting a character, so I can see that they sort of struggled with her a bit. But I always felt that I never got to do as much with her in the strip as maybe I could have.
ES: Which gave you more creative freedom: the comic or the strip?
AG: I think they both did. The comic book as a medium is easier to work with. You have 20-22 pages to do material in. You have room for bigger and better visuals, you are less restricted. A syndicated comic strip is very restrictive: in how much space you have, how many panels you have, how the material has to be adjusted for newspapers that only run daily strips and those that only carry Sunday strips, newspapers that don't carry Saturday, those that do... To a certain extent doing the comic strip becomes like working a crossword puzzle. You've got to have big suspense Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and yet constant daily suspense; so in that sense, the strip is more restrictive. But in terms of telling some good Star Wars stories, they both have great potential and possibility. The limitations always seem to be in the people doing it rather than in the forms themselves.
ES: Did you follow the rest of the Marvel comic's run?
AG: I followed some of it for a while. Once you've written something for yourself, you kind of turn away from it. Its kind of hard to look back and see what someone else is doing with it, even when they are doing very well... because you say, "Gee, I'm not sure I would have done that" or "Why don't they do this?" The reality is that they are probably doing very well, but its a little hard to judge.
ES: Have you seen any of the Dark Horse Star Wars comics?
AG: Yeah, well actually, when I was editor of Epic comics, Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy had come to me with the notion of doing a Star Wars sequel. I had tried to interest Marvel in doing that; unfortunately, before any of that was resolved, I made a job change over to DC and Marvel made the decision that they were not interesting in doing any more Star Wars material. The Dark Horse material since then has become so successful that there is so much of it - I try to look through it but I don't have the time to sit down and go through all of it.
ES: By the way, we had a conference with Tom Veitch a few months ago and he mentioned that he loves the work that you and Al Williamson did.
AG: I really appreciate that. Tom studied pretty much everything on Star Wars before he wrote his own stuff.
ES: Do you feel that Dark Horse may have been given a little more creative freedom than you had because you were writing while the first three films were still being produced and released?
AG: I don't know what kind of restrictions they (Dark Horse) work under. I would think its just a different set of problems. There is just such a mass of Star Wars material, and of course part of the reason that there was such an interest in doing the Dark Horse comics was that the Star Wars gaming stuff (from West End Games) had shown a great of popularity. I would think that would be just as restrictive as anything I would want to do. Even though the events are taking place after the trilogy, I would think that would be an enormous problem.
ES: Thank you for joining us today, we really appreciate the time you have taken out to spend with us.
AG: Its been a real pleasure. I'm always happy to talk about Star Wars.
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