Here is the situation. Marvel UK is reprinting the American Star Wars comic in black and white, split across more issues than the originals because a British weekly needs several serials running at once. By late 1981 it is catching up with its own source material and needs pages. It has no Lucasfilm-approved pitch process worth the name, a tiny budget, and a bullpen containing Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, John Stokes and Alan Davis.
What came out
Seven short strips, printed between August 1981 and July 1982 across The Empire Strikes Back Monthly 149–157 and Star Wars Monthly 159. They do not look, read or behave like Star Wars comics. “Tilotny Throws a Shape” strands Leia Organa on an unnamed world where four spirits amuse themselves by turning a stormtrooper into a diamond, doing the same to Leia’s heart, and then undoing all of it because one of them is tidy. “Rust Never Sleeps” takes C-3PO and R2-D2 to a scrapyard planet where discarded droids worship the junk they are buried in. “The Pandora Effect” is a horror story about a cult that collects pain. “Dark Lord’s Conscience” puts Darth Vader across a gaming table from an empath who kills by making his victims feel the full weight of what they have done.
Why they are worth finding
Because they are the only Star Wars stories written by people who were not trying to write Star Wars stories. Moore was a jobbing British writer taking a licensed gig; the constraint was five to fifteen black-and-white pages with no continuity consequences. What he did with that is a set of mood pieces that use the setting as furniture and go somewhere else entirely. Nothing in the American book of the same period is doing anything remotely like it.
Continuity, for the people who care
These are Legends, and for a long time they were Legends of the least official kind — printed in Britain, never reprinted, effectively invisible. That changed slowly: characters and events from “Dark Lord’s Conscience,” “Blind Fury!,” “The Pandora Effect” and “Tilotny Throws a Shape” were referenced in The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, which pulled them up the old Holocron ranking. It is a strange fate for a filler strip.
How to read them
Six of the seven are in Classic Star Wars: Devilworlds 1 and 2 from 1996, recoloured. “Death Masque” is not; it was left out and finally reprinted in Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1 in 2013, which is also the easiest single place to find the lot.
