It’s certainly been a good week for IDW on the Star Wars front, hasn’t it? Having been recently confirmed to have pulled off the incredible coup of gaining license to publish the upcoming young reader friendly Star Wars Adventures, they’ve just announced that more science fiction awesomeness is on the way in the form of Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol. 1.
In a nutshell, this first tome in a three volume series contains 575 sequential strips from the original newspaper comics that ran from March 11, 1979 to October 5, 1980. Furthermore, the publisher plans to include “every Sunday’s title header and ‘bonus’ panels in meticulously restored original color, making this the first-ever complete collection of this comics classic as they originally appeared.”
Greg Goldstein, IDW Publishing’s President and COO, had this to say:
“Some of these strips have been reprinted in other formats, but, like many of our other LOAC collections, this is the first fully complete, chronological collection of the strips as they originally appeared when they graced the morning papers nearly 40 years ago.”
Now, some of you out there are probably wondering how IDW was able to pull this off in the first place, seeing as how Marvel has pretty much had Star Wars comics under their umbrella for the past few years. Well, it should be noted that IDW and Marvel have had a pretty decent relationship for some time now, leading to the former rolling out souped up editions of some of the latter’s classic tales. Given that, it shouldn’t be too much of a shocker that the two publishers and Lucasfilm are willing to continue doing business.
Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol. 1 arrives in stores this May.
