Every comics adaptation of A New Hope before this one had the same job: get the film onto the page recognisably. Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin did it in 1977 under deadline. What Hisao Tamaki did in 1997 was something else — he adapted the screenplay rather than the film, and drew it as though the film did not exist.
What changes when the grammar changes
Manga pacing is spatial. A moment that occupies two seconds of screen time can occupy four pages; a scene that runs three minutes can go by in six panels. Tamaki uses that licence constantly. The Falcon's escape from Mos Eisley is enormous. Conversations are compressed to almost nothing. Luke's face does things it never does in the film, because shonen faces are allowed to.
The most quietly radical decision is Vader. On screen he is a fixed object — a mask that does not move, which is exactly why it works. On the page Tamaki has to generate menace without the voice or the breathing, and he does it with scale and negative space, letting the figure dominate panels that have no business containing him.
The caveats
It is black and white, it is long, and the English editions read left-to-right in flopped art, which was standard practice in 1998 and looks wrong now. The character designs will not be what a reader expects. That is the whole point, but it is worth knowing before you start.
Continuity
This is Legends, and it was always treated as a slightly odd case even then — an adaptation, so nominally as authoritative as the novelisation, but visibly its own thing. Tamaki's version was followed by Toshiki Kudo on The Empire Strikes Back, Shin-ichi Hiromoto on Return of the Jedi and Kia Asamiya on The Phantom Menace, none of whom take anything like the same approach.
