Right, I must have been growing up when I did this page. And feeling a bit more confident - at home - around the parents! I still remember describing something as 'crap' when I was 7 or 8 in Scotland and my dad said - very sternly

"John, you shouldn't use that word. It's nearly as bad as saying ess-aych-eye-tee".

I was really scared. But in 1981 or '82 I'd obviously got over it!

Allegedly, the original Death Star model. An interesting living room centre-piece. (From the collection of Tim Williams, Patrick Franklin, and Todd Franklin)

Art Notes

More far-too-thick black felt-tip.

Tell you what I do like though - the red arc behind the little TIE Fighter. Or more specifically, the way it changes direction.

In panels 1-2 it sweeps right - then sweeps left in panel 3, and back again in panel 4. In this series of panels - that Scott McLeod in the classic 'Understanding Comics' would call Moment-to-moment transitions, so popular in Japanese comics; the action works simply, but well. The Death Star also gets larger and the Falcon gets smaller - an exaggerated inverse-relationship that works well.

Howard Chaykin's Marvel version. Copied from mine of course.

I'd like to say it was all down to my own early brilliance - but Howard Chaykin did it first. I did make the frame for the bottom panel all explosive looking though.

That was a bit boringly technical wasn't it? Tell you what though, later in life I became an animator for several years.

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