In 1974 George Lucas finished a rough draft called The Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is a grizzled general. The young hero is Annikin Starkiller. Han Solo is a green-skinned alien. There is no Force as the films define it, no Death Star as the films stage it, and a lot of Flash Gordon showing through the weave. Lucasfilm’s own archivist adapted it, page for page, in 2013.
Why it works at all
Because Rinzler does not fix it. The temptation with a document like this is to smooth the draft into something releasable; instead the comic keeps the draft’s odd pacing, its dead ends and its unfamiliar vocabulary, and lets the reader feel how close the finished film came to being a different genre. Mike Mayhew paints it with full seriousness, leaning on Ralph McQuarrie’s earliest concept work, which is exactly the right call — played for laughs it would be worthless.
What it is not
It is not in continuity, canon or Legends, and Dark Horse never pretended otherwise. It is also, structurally, a first draft: characters arrive and vanish, the middle sags, and the climax is a space battle that the reader has no emotional stake in because these versions of these people have not earned one in eight issues.
Read it next to the 1976 novelisation and the distance between them is the whole story of how Star Wars got made.
