I grew up in a great era for science fiction fans. The first Star Wars film came out just as I was finishing up the sixth grade. Movies were slow to reach the small Louisiana town where my family lived, but we visited cousins in Dallas that summer, and my teenage cousin Pam and her boyfriend took my brothers and me to see Star Wars. I remember the audience laughing and cheering when the stars blurred out as Han Solo’s ship jumped to light speed for the first time. In our hot rod culture, that was just plain cool. The bar full of aliens was a hit too. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. Pam said all the guys in her high school were making R2D2 noises and thought it was kind of weird. Pam liked “that good-looking guy” in the movie. I asked her if she meant Luke. “No,” she said. “He was a kid.” It was Han Solo that captured her fancy.
There was a whole string of science fiction movies after that: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Alien all came out within the next three years or so. Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers appeared as TV series. Then there were the movie sequels. Two of those really stood out to me: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
As I mentioned, movies were slow to get to the place where I lived. I didn’t see Empire until two years or so after it had been released, but I read the paperback adaptation on the way to a playoff game in New Orleans on the high school band bus. Three scenes stood out to me. One was when Obi-Wan Kenobi’s apparition appeared to Luke when he was lying wounded on Hoth, the ice planet. Luke’s strange journey continued on the swampy moon of Dagobah where he met Yoda the Jedi master (who was kind of like a combination of Kermit the frog and an elf). In one mysterious scene, Luke went into a cave and had a vision in which he fought Darth Vader and defeated him by severing his head. When he saw the face beneath the mask, it was his own. Finally, there was the dramatic scene that explained the vision. In a confrontation with the real Darth Vader, Luke discovered that the masked villain was really his father. It could have been a deception, but somehow he knew that it was true.
I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the summer I started college. I enjoyed the whole movie so much, I have a hard time identifying a favorite scene. At least one friend has told me Intrepid Force reminded him of The Wrath of Khan. Since I wrote the second draft within months of seeing the movie, that would make sense. It was probably just the plot about an old enemy escaping and coming back with a vengeance that he was referring to, but I didn’t add that until this last edition. I really enjoyed Vonda McIntyre’s Star Trek novels, including her novelizations of the movies, so she might have influenced my style a little bit too. She has written some Star Wars novels too, but I haven’t read them yet.
The aesthetic I used in my cover art and in the Intrepid Force graphic novel project I’ve been working on owes a certain amount of debt to both “Stars” (Trek and Wars) as well as to the comics and real life locations I’ve already written about.
I’ve gotten to meet some of the actors from those movies (David Prowse, Kenny Baker, Leonard Nimoy), but would really enjoy sitting down with the writers and concept artists. My friend Al Bohl (the creator of Zanaan) told me about a surprise he got after he did an art presentation at a church once. He was drinking coffee at the home of one of the women from the church, and she told him her grandson was also an artist. She asked if he would like to see some of his work. Al said that he would and expected to see a child’s drawings, but she came back with a hardback book of Star Wars concept art by Joe Johnston. (Here’s Joe’s Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Joe-Johnston/e/B000APRM8I/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1509712185&sr=1-2-ent) I’d love to talk to him.
