Marvel adapted all three original films, and the three adaptations are a neat little history of what the licence had learned. Star Wars (1977) was drawn from production stills and a script by people who had not seen the film. The Empire Strikes Back was drawn by Al Williamson, who had wanted the newspaper strip in 1979 and was finally handed the material he was born to draw. Return of the Jedi is the one where Archie Goodwin and Williamson had done it before and knew where to compress.
Two publications, one adaptation
The adaptation was published complete in Marvel Super Special 27, cover-dated August 1983, and then serialised across these four issues from October 1983. That order matters if you are collecting: the Super Special is the first appearance, the limited series is the reprint, and both were on shelves within months of each other. The same thing had happened three years earlier with The Empire Strikes Back, where Marvel Super Special 16 and a treasury edition arrived at roughly the same moment and nobody has ever settled which is the original.
What Williamson does with it
Williamson had spent his career on adventure strips — Flash Gordon, Secret Agent Corrigan, the Star Wars newspaper strip he took over in 1981 — and the habit shows. He stages the sail barge sequence as a series of horizontals, lets the speeder bikes run diagonally across a page rather than boxing them, and draws the Emperor as a hooded shape rather than a face. Carlos Garzon finishes. The colour is flat 1983 newsprint colour and the storytelling survives it easily.
The honest caveat
It is still an adaptation, and adaptations of films you have already seen are the least essential comics ever printed. What you are buying is draughtsmanship. On that basis this one earns its shelf space, and the four Sienkiewicz covers are worth the price on their own.
