Marvel Star Wars: Issue 6: Is This the Final Chapter?

The cover is inaccurate. There are no Y-Wings in this issue.

Issue six closes out the adaptation of A New Hope with wall-to-wall space battle action. Its the entire Battle of Yavin, and Luke Skywalker & Blue Squadron fight their way to a hard-earned victory. Han saves Luke, Death Star blows up, everybody except Chewie gets a medal, you know the drill.

The scope of the battle here is much smaller than the movie. Gold Squadron's Y-Wings are completely absent. Blue Squadron consists of six starfighters, and that's it.

The final issue shakes up the creative team. While Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin remain as writer & penciller, the inks are now done by Rick Hoberg (who apprenticed under the great Russ Manning) & Bill Wray (who would go on to work on Ren & Stimpy and other animated shows) and the colors are by the future wife of Dave Cockrum, Paty (they married in 1978).

The different inks and colors give it a completely different feel to the action. The inks are thick and the neon colors are strikingly bold. Its some of the most consistently dynamic art of the adaptation, and just about every page looks like it would make for a great pop art poster.

No lie, I would hang this on a wall

And that wraps up the 70s Marvel adaptation of Star Wars (A New Hope was added later). Its okay. Its not great, and even for its time, the art isn't consistently great compared to other Marvel books from the time (Avengers was still an A level book and X-Men was on its way up. Savage Sword of Conan was knocking it out of the park consistently with top level art). As a read, its okay, but aside from the script differences, there's no real reason to choose to read these six issues over re-watching A New Hope.

Its an interesting time capsule of popular Sci-Fi commercial art from the late 1970s and an early look at interpreting the Star Wars universe, but there's not much to it beyond that. Optionial tier.

However, the issues sold very, very well, and Marvel found themselves with a successful book with a demand for an ongoing series, so ongoing series it became.

That's where it gets really interesting.