9 Fantastic Stormtroopers Out of the Star Wars Newspaper Strips
Earlier this month I posted “9 Great Stormtrooper Illustrations by Carmine Infantino” as a demonstration of my love of Infantino’s Star Wars comic artwork. Now it’s time we turn to the Star Wars newspaper strip of the seventies and eighties and get a look at Stormtroopers illustrated by Russ Manning and Al Williamson, two master artists who each contributed to the early years of the Star Wars empire.
NOTE: The images shown here come from the Dark Horse reprints of the comic strips. Dark Horse grabbed the old B&W strips and then reformated and colored the artwork to create comics. You can find these versions in Classic Star Wars*, Classic Star Wars Early Adventures*, and other titles under the “Classic” banner.
Russ Manning
First up are images from Russ Manning, the first artist on the Star Wars newspaper strip. Manning died in 1981, as the strip was an active project, and would eventually be replaced by Al Williamson, but while he was alive and working Manning was both writing and illustrating the strip. And, as the images here show, his art was perfect for the Star Wars of the time and exhibited an innocence and freshness that we don’t get in today’s “follow the style guide” Star Wars worlds.
The image above shows us one of Manning’s contributions to the Star Wars universe: Shadow Stormtroopers (find at Amazon.com*), originally known as “Blackhole Stormtroopers” because of their allegiance to the Blackhole character, were black-armored Stormtroopers that appeared in some of the earliest Manning stories.
Manning’s Stormtroopers, much like Infantino’s Stormtrooper illustrations, are a blend of movie reference and the Kenner action figure, and it’s that gray area of Stormtrooper design that makes these so appealing. I doubt we would ever see Lucasfilm allow a toy design to be as off-model today as those Kenner Stormtroopers, and I cannot put into words how thankful I am that I got to live the earliest Star Wars years.
These slightly-off Stormtrooper designs probably bother some people, but for me the Manning art is as perfect as any photo-realistic illustration.
Al Williamson
“Although Al has never met George Lucas, it was Lucas who hand-picked Al to draw the Star Wars newspaper strip.”
Carmine Infantino may be my favorite of the Star Wars artists (as I wrote in 2010), but Al Williamson stands out as easily in my top five favorite artists to contribute to Lucas’ galaxy. Williamson, a legend with decades of experience before his work on Star Wars, brought his photo-realistic style to the Star Wars comics through adaptations of Empire and Jedi and, after the death of Manning, handled the newspaper strip until its cancellation in 1984.
Williamson was, as is discussed in The Art of Al Williamson*, Lucas’ first choice to work on the Star Wars newspaper strips. That Williamson book, published in 1983, even shares the strips Williamson created that were never published. The initial plan was for the weekly strip to adapt the original film and those unused strips can be found in The Art of Al Williamson*. Beautiful work!
The images shown here show how Williamson’s work differed from that of Infantino and Manning. Where those two provided us with Star Wars artwork that had more in common with the toys and imagined designs that didn’t quite fit the movie reference, Williamson held closer to the Stormtrooper armor we saw in the original films. The image below, especially the close up of the Stormtrooper helmet, is far more movie-accurate than Manning or Infantino’s work.
Masters
Regardless of their individual styles, Manning and Williamson each were masters of the form and brought something special to the Star Wars universe. I may have been more familiar with Infantino’s Stormtrooper illustrations as a kid, but over the last few decades I’ve gained an appreciation of the newspaper strips and wish I could rush out and buy a collection showing the strips as they originally appeared.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever see this style of Star Wars comic artwork again. Manning and Williamson were both expert artists of the fifties who went on to leave their mark on Lucas’ universe because Lucas was a child of the fifties and their art styles appealed to his sense of nostalgia.
While an original newspaper strip published today in the artistic style of those older comics would be amazing I don’t think we’ll see such a thing. And that makes these stories all the more important; hopefully someone at Marvel is already looking at the original stories and working to bring them to print in their untouched, uncolored, and classic B&W form.