
He also got first shot at a poster for the film. Howard Chaykin was the illustrator brought on for the first 10 issues of the comic run. There’s a really neat book by Garry Jenkins called Empire Building: The Remarkable Real-Life Story of Star Wars that gets into this story. There’s more than one source attributing Marvel’s financial success for 19 to the sales of that run. Star Wars was in theaters forever and also happened to be a cultural juggernaut. Ultimately, they did agree to publish the tie-in provided Lucasfilm received no royalties until 100,000 comics in the line were sold. Basically, Marvel turned them down cold originally because movie tie-ins didn’t sell. There’s some really fascinating exchanges between the Lucasfilm publicity folks and Marvel Comics. As a part of that, they approached Marvel to develop a tie-in comic. Art by Howard ChaykinAs Lucasfilm was developing Star Wars, they figured their most likely audience would overlap extensively with your average comic book reader. Hang out with me here for a bit as we flip through a digital flat file of some these terrific Star Wars posters. Rogue One is operating with a different color palette, but much of the design layout holds over. There is a clear graphic influence in presentation from the original Star Wars poster all the way through to The Force Awakens. If you’ve got an original of these on your wall, color me jealous.Īrt by Tom JungThere’s more to the poster history than that story, though.

Later, Lucasfilm sent out some of the non-destroyed versions to members of the fan club. A frustrated Lucas heads down to the printing presses and demands they all be destroyed. Based entirely on the notion that Jedis don’t do revenge. They decided to change the name after the poster has been produced.

I know most folks have probably heard the story of the Revenge of the Jedi poster. These are two of my most favorite things. I’m excited to be talking Star Wars and posters. Welcome along to the Poster Art portion of our Star Wars Extravaganza.

Forty years, hundreds of artists, dozens of countries.
