Comic Book Legends Revealed #554

Welcome to the five hundred and fifty-fourth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, in honor of The Force Awakens, it is an all-Star Wars edition! Did a Marvel Comics letterer design the famous Star Wars logo for twenty-five bucks? Did the New Universe kill Star Wars? And why, exactly, did Marvel's Jabba the Hutt look the way he did?

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: A Marvel letterer came up with the famous Star Wars design for Marvel's Star Wars comic.

STATUS: I'm Going With False

It's funny, our own G. Kendall (check out his regular feature examining old issues of Wizard Magazine) recommended this to me recently but I had actually been planning on doing this one for some time now, as I thought it would be a nice legend to do when Force Awakens came out.

Anyhow, the story boils down to an interview longtime Marvel letterer Jim Novak gave in the first issue of David A. Kraft's Comics Interview...

DAK: You’ve been credited as letterer of almost every series Marvel publishes, at one time or another, Jim. What are some of your uncredited works?

Jim Novak: The Spider-Man newspaper strip, various logos such as Power Man & Iron Fist (that’s one I remember doing that I felt proud of). The Star Wars logo has kind of an unusual story behind it. They brought in their logo from the studio and Stan Lee wasn’t crazy about it—the “W” was a little bit different looking and the letters weren’t Marvel-style. So I ended up re-doing it. It was way before the movie even came out. I didn’t even know what Star Wars was, at that point.

DAK: No one had any idea.

Jim: At the same time, we were working on the comic adaptation. I lettered the first issue, and I had no idea what that was about, either. The next thing I knew, the Star Wars logo was being used everywhere, from newspaper ads to some of the promotion and merchandizing materials.

DAK: You did that logo for Marvel and it ended up on all the Star Wars stuff?

Jim: Yeah. It was kind of a surprise to me, because I didn’t give it much thought. I was either working on staff or just there that day. I made a few significant changes, but it was basically their design and I Marvelized it, let’s put it that way.

DAK: Which one do they use now on posters?

Jim: I think it’s my logo. I don’t recall seeing the one they probably spent a couple thousand dollars on.

DAK: And you did yours for...

Jim: Twenty-five dollars. Things have changed since then. Now the financial situation is a lot different….

So is that true? Was the famous Star Wars logo designed for just twenty-five bucks?

I don't believe so, no.

Here is the cover to Star Wars #1...

Here, then, is the logo that designed Suzy Rice came up with early on in the Star Wars process...

Industrial Light and Magic's Joe Johnston altered the W on Rice's logo during the final preparation of the opening credits of the film (her W didn't look right on the screen).

That's the logo we see to this day...

As you can see, Novak clearly DID design his own Star Wars logo - it just wasn't THE Star Wars logo.

And on the second issue of the series, Marvel basically went to the Rice logo, although keeping Novak's W...

and kept it for the rest of the original run of the series. That particular logo (Novak's W and Rice's everything else) was used just on the comic book.

Note that Novak wasn't exactly definitive in his statement about what logo was being used elsewhere, so I guess he was just confused. It wasn't like he was making any outright "I created the famous logo!" statements.

Alex Jay does an AMAZING job looking into the history of the Star Wars logo here. You really should give it a read. It's meticulously researched and a great read.

Thanks to G. Kendall for the suggestion!

Check out some entertainment and sports legends from this week at Legends Revealed:

Was Flash Gordon Nearly in A Christmas Story?

Was South Park Originally Going to be a Big Parody of The X-Files?

Did an NBA Player Once Miss Three Games Due to Infected Hair Follicles?

Were the Lyrics to Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession” Taken from an Actual Stalker’s Letters?

COMIC LEGEND: Star Wars was canceled by Marvel because of the New Universe.

STATUS: Close Enough to a True for a True

After over a hundred issues, Marvel's original Star Wars series ended in June 1986 with #107...

Interestingly enough, the series was not actually canceled due to low sales. Well...that was not the DRIVING force, at least.

You see, well before 1986 rolled around, Marvel was promoting their mysterious "New Universe" as part of their 1986 celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Marvel Universe...

And as part of the launch, Marvel decided to clear the deck by eliminating a number of their lower-selling titles - books that weren't losing money, but were not doing great.

I asked former Marvel editor Carl Potts to describe the motivations behind a move like that, and he nicely summed it up:

If a book was not selling well (back then, anything with monthly sales at or below 100,000 was not considered to be doing well!), the company sometimes felt it was better to use the financial, editorial, marketing, manufacturing, distribution and rack space real estate resources to try a new title than keep a fading title going.

That was definitely the case with Star Wars. It was still selling pretty well, but it was definitely fading. It had gone bi-monthly at the end of 1985/beginning of 1986 with issue #105. That was about the same time Marvel was eliminating a few other titles like the Thing and the New Defenders (to be fair, Defenders also was about to lose a good chunk of its cast for X-Factor, so that likely played a role in its demise, as well). In June 1986, Star Wars ended along with Power Man and Iron Fist, which was also selling over 100,000 copies but had also gone bi-monthly (I did a legend a few years back about how Denny O'Neil was irritated at Power Man and Iron Fist being pushed out of the way for the New Universe, so he told Jim Owsley to kill off Iron Fist in the last issue).

Carl also explained that with a licensed book, the sales cutoff point is obviously higher because of the licensing fees that Marvel would have to pay (The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones and Doctor Who were both also cut by Marvel in 1986). By the way, Carl did not recall precisely why Star Wars was canceled - he just answered my question about whether stuff like this WERE reasons for titles to be canceled back then.

In addition, Marvel was frustrated at the limitations Lucasfilm was putting on the book, as since George Lucas didn't know if the movies were going to continue, he basically told Marvel that they couldn't really do much with the characters as he wouldn't know whether their ideas would be in conflict with his. So that definitely played a role.

In the end, though, sales ultimately were a HUGE part of it, as sales WERE down. And if the book was selling better, it would not have been canceled for the New Universe, so the New Universe's role, while real, is perhaps a BIT overstated, but at the same time, if there was not a drive to make room on the production schedule for New Universe, Star Wars probably would not have been canceled, hence the legend being true enough for a true.

The cancellation news came to Star Wars writer Jo Duffy's attention as she was midway through writing the issue - she had to quickly change the story to make it a final issue. Even Marvel Age didn't know what's what - as their description for Star Wars #107 in Marvel Age #41 was away off...

Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: Did A Charlie Brown Christmas seriously drive aluminum Christmas trees out of business?

COMIC LEGEND: Howard Chaykin designed Jabba the Hutt on his own because Lucasfilm never gave him a photo reference to work with.

STATUS: Technically False

I had a different legend ready to go here, but enough people wanted to discuss this one yesterday that I figure I'll just feature it now.

Anyhow, yesterday I wrote about how Howard Chaykin wasn't given a design for Jabba the Hutt (in a scene that George Lucas ended up cutting from the first Star Wars film) so he made his own design...

However, commenter HashMaster9000 (and others) actually informed me that Chaykin did NOT come up with the design on his own. Instead, with the deadline fast approaching, he just picked a photo of various characters considered for the Cantina scene in Star Wars and picked one of the designs. Here is that photo...

So there ya go!

Thanks to HashMaster9000 and all the other good folks who wrote in to explain that part of the story to me! Next week, you'll see the legend that was originally going to run here (as suggested years ago by Matt Bird).

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends - half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...(click to enlarge)...