Boba Fett

Firstly. let me pause to welcome a valuable new member of the Early Works team, the Canon CanoScan LiDE 20 scanner, who will be filling the position formerly occupied by Mr. AcerScan 620U. It is hoped that a scanner not bearing a sticker exhorting the user to "Get Ready For Win98" may be better equipped to serve this blog's needs.
Now, to the matter at hand: everyone's favorite bounty hunter, Mr. Fett. This drawing was drawn months in advance of his live-action debut (but over a year after his animated debut), and is referenced partly from a plastic cup available at theaters during that year's Star Wars re-release (mine is inaccessible, and I can't find it online, but here's another in the same set), but mostly from the ad on the back of the action figures for the mail-in offer that convinced a generation of the existence of the "missile-firing backpack" Fett figure. For those who haven't got the memo yet---that kid you knew who swore that he had one/ his cousin had one/ some kid at camp had one was lying. He didn't.
The detailed color work on this piece was done with the felt-tip markers discussed here, and the forest background was rendered either with Design Markers (R.I.P) or those Magic Marker-brand pens whose body is actually a stubby glass bottle with the label shrinkwrapped around it. Man, I loved those things! I suppose that it's been long enough that I can confess that the few of them that I ever had were in fact stolen from school. But if I'd ever known where to get them, I'd have gladly purchased them legitimately! Incidentally, I couldn't find any images of the particular model I'm discussing, but here's Sidney Rosenthal's original patent, and here's a really amazingly cool variation on the theme that I covet mightily.

Darth Vader's Head

I suspect that the stylized diamond-shaped "cheekbones" here are clumsily-referenced from Carmine Infantino's art in the Star Wars comic, but that's only conjecture.

Determined X-Wing Pilot

This guy means business. Woe betide any TIE fighter pilots that get in his way.

War of the Satellites: the Prequel

Well...it looks like I have to slightly revise my understanding of last Wednesday's entry, which it now appears was the second panel of a narrative sequence. It seems that the space pirate's satellite-thingy was engaged in a dogfight with some sort of composite of an X-wing fighter and a Colonial Viper (suggesting that this was drawn slightly later than I'd imagined), as seen here, before defeating it in the previously-shown piece. It is likely that the off-panel assailants of the pirate craft in the other piece would be found to resemble the ship shown here. Aren't you glad we cleared that up?

The tiny, awkward X-wing seems very much an afterthought, added to lend some sort of drama to the static frontal view of Lord Vader's souped-up TIE fighter. I don't think it succeeds.

Derivative Robot with Pistol

This fellow's head seems to be a variation on the "Death Star Droid" (with some kind of gadget emitting an electrical arc added on his forehead), while his legs come from Force Commander. The background is fairly perfunctory...note that the small rocky hill is in fact too small for the door built into it. It looks like I tried to fix it by adding a tiny doorway at the bottom to turn it into a tall building off in the distance that's awkwardly placed in front of a mountain, but the horizon line betrays me.

Death Star Droid

Drawn the same week in '79 as last Monday's entry, and unquestionably referenced from the action figure.

Droid With a Bad Motivator

Yes, it's poor old R5-D4, hanging out with another droid that I apparently decided wasn't worth finishing. Back in the period between EMPIRE and JEDI, when there was much speculation as to who the other potential Jedi that Yoda had referred to might be, the best theory I ever heard of picked R2-D2. The evidence for this being that, when Uncle Owen passed over R2 in favor of today's star attraction, R2 beeped angrily and shook a bit, and KERPOW!! Poor R5-D4's head blew up... just as if R2 had used "Jedi mind tricks" to sabotage him! It was obviously a stretch, but it still could have made for a better film than the cinematic cow patty that we wound up with.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now!

This is from one of the scenes with John Belushi as a Death Squad Commander that were cut from the final released version. Okay, so technically speaking, that's what is known as a "bare-faced lie", but there is an undeniable resemblance.This is the last to be posted, but the first-drawn of a series of images of Star Wars folk getting shot that I drew in the spring of 1979. This is unique among them in that the protagonist hasn't actually gotten shot yet, and there's an attempt at a background (with rudimentary perspective, even!).

Poor Stormtrooper!

This is the immediate precursor to the popular Walrus Man diptych from one of the first posts here. There's actually another one before this showing a Death Squad Commander fleeing from pursuing blaster fire, but I'm withholding that one for a later discussion of one-point perspective.

Contour Drawings

Not blind contour drawings, but that would probably been even more hilarious. Note that, at this point, at least, I have equal allegiance to Lucas and Rodenberry. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE sorely tested my faith, though in the end it would seem almost watchable next to the horror that was RETURN OF THE JEDI. Nowadays, I'd be just as happy if I never saw anything new from either camp ever again.

Poor Walrus Man!

These are actually preceded in the notebook by a Death Squad Commander fleeing blaster fire (in shaky one-point perspective) and a Stormtrooper being hit similarly to the right hand image, but why I thought poor Walrus Man (whom modern-day nerds know as
Ponda Baba ) deserved to get killed twice is no longer clear to me. I'm also not quite certain why he's getting killed on a trapeze, but I assume that I drew the pose and then tried to justify it. I feel confident in saying that this was drawn in winter or early spring of 1979; Walrus Man would have been the latest hot celebrity on the toy shelf in my room, hanging out in his cardboard cantina with Hammerhead, Greedo, and Blue Snaggletooth. Many years later, one of the guys in the Cardigans came to my house and tried to buy Snaggletooth from me (I declined), but he didn't even ask about poor Walrus Man.