The Complete Saga, Episodes I Through VI (Star Wars Omnibus) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

In 1977 while at the laundry mat at the top of the hill with my mom, I came across a People magazine article about a new movie coming out. It showed a picture of 2 robots, R2D2 and C3PO. Being a big SciFi fan at the age of 9, I thought "wow, I need to see that!".

I spent the summer, as well as my youth, watching and dreaming Star Wars. Comics, games, movies. I read somewhere that some guy put himself through college by selling comic books that he had saved as a kid, not realizing that comics in his age (1940's?) were not collected, but discarded, making them valuable. Imagine my surprise, when, after diligently saving every Star Wars comic and carefully putting it in plastic after carefully reading it, it turned out my 10 year obsession with Star Wars comics was virtually worthless...

Now, I'm still a huge Star Wars fan: Read all the Timothy Zahn books, get the Clone Wars DVD's, got the ring tone. Since I no longer have those old comic books, and I like to draw now as an adult, I decided to get this comic book volume.

The art work is very good, especially the newer ones, (Episodes 1 - 3). The writing is kind of tight though, if you've never see the Star Wars movies (welcome to Earth, by the way) some parts and dialog is left out, but it flows nicely.

I'm confused by the artwork for Episodes 4 - 6, it looks better than I remember and I realized it must be some sort of updated version. I had this confirmed to me in a most unpleasant discovery:

Greedo shoots first.

Bizarre to me, this decision of George Lucas. On the one hand, George is concerned that "children should know that Han had no choice but to shoot Greedo". Would Han shooting a bounty hunter, who might take Han to his death, make his transformation into a "good guy" later on impossible? How about Anakin Skywalker murdering children in Episode 3? That's not morally ambiguous, its almost impossible to get sympathy for Anakin after that, how can killing Greedo while he has a gun pointed at you make you incapable of a later moral change? At the end of episode 6 we are supposed to believe that Anakin has had a moral change. What gun did the younglings have pointed at Anakin? George is off his rocker with this bit of revisionist history.

My second complaint about this book is its size. Its not even as large as a comic book. Comic books are about 10" by 6.5", this book is 9" by 6". If anything, the beautiful drawings deserved a larger page, not a smaller one. A lot of the scenes are shrunk down instead of being at least as large as a comic book, another bad decision.

Over all, its a good book, the updated graphics are probably for the best, I might have liked to see the old ones again but times have changed, the update is nice (minus the Han Shot First revision...) but the size is just too small and doesn't take advantage of the medium, like seeing Star Wars on a TV, its just not the same, but worth doing if that's what you got...

The versions of the original trilogy comics collected here do indeed contain the special edition alterations. However, these particular editions are based on the special edition comics that were released to coincide with the release of the special editions in theaters back in 1997. They contain minor alterations and in the case of A New Hope, is an entirely new mini series. If you want the original versions of the comics they are available as well in the Omnibus A Long Time Ago... collections. Even if you prefer the original Marvel versions, this is still a great buy if you want all the prequel adaptations and a must have for any Star Wars comics completest.

The art work is good, parts of the story from the novels has been add in to help it along. the only down side I have is it's based off the new STAR WARS Episodes 4-6 movies and not the orginal movies that were closer to the novels.