Concept
A Star Wars comic strip ran in both daily strips and Sunday strips, originally distributed between 1979 and 1984 by two American newspaper publishers, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and Watertown Daily Times. The comics are set between the original Star Wars film and The Empire Strikes Back, with the exception of an adaptation of Brian Daley's Han Solo at Stars' End (1979). The first run, by Russ Manning, was primarily created before the release of The Empire Strikes Back, while Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson, in their storylines, worked with the benefit of having seen both films, in addition to Return of the Jedi in 1983. In 1991, Russ Cochran published a 2500-copy limited run of a three-volume hardcover boxset of all of Goodwin and Williamson's Star Wars comic strips from between 1981 and 1984. From 1992 to 1994, Dark Horse Comics collected colorized compilations of the newspaper strip in its Classic Star Wars series. Between 2017 and 2018, The Library of American Comics and IDW Publishing published a three-volume reprint series of the complete comic strip. In 1978, writer Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson proposed an adaptation of the original Star Wars film as a daily newspaper comic strip, producing 12 black-and-white samples, but the team ended up not being available to produce the full strip. By the next year, writer and artist Russ Manning was hired to produce both a daily and Sunday strip spun off from the film. These originally told separate stories, which according to Manning were largely made up as he went along. After six months, he was replaced as writer, reportedly because newspapers wanted a story that was "more like a comic book". Subsequently, the daily and Sunday strips no longer told separate stories. Manning left the strip in mid-1980 due to his declining health; he died due to cancer the next year. A new artist, Alfredo Alcala, replaced him for a brief run, working with writer Archie Goodwin on an adaptation of Brian Daley's 1979 novel Han Solo at Stars' End.
