Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - Ewoks #1 // Review
Wookiees. They wanted Wookiees for Return of the Jedi. Legend has it that they were going to be too expensive, so...they just sort of...made the Wookiees shorter. That’s where the Ewoks came from. Marvel and Lucasfilm collaborated on a Saturday morning cartoon that was also adapted for a series of comics for Marvel’s Star Comics line. Years later, Marvel and Lucasfilm are both owned by Disney. They celebrate the Ewoks’ 40th anniversary with Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - Ewoks #1. The one-shot features a number of stories presented entirely without dialogue. Writer Alyssa Wong collaborates on a series of stories with a large group of artists, including Lee Garbett, Caspar Wijngaard, Kyle Hotz, and Paulina Ganucheau. Color comes to the page courtesy of Java Tartaglia and Rachelle Rosenberg.
The forest moon of Endor is populated by furry, little tree-dwellers known as Ewoks. Their agrarian lifestyle might be the furthest thing imaginable from the gleaming planetwide metropolis of Coruscant, but even they feel the strife of galactic civil war against the Empire. One night, they share a few stories that help them forget about the dangers that seem to be encroaching on them as a Death Star is slowly assembled in the sky.
Wong manages a wide variety of nonverbal stories that run quite a range. The story of an Ewok tinker feels like its own triumph. Ewok chieftain Logray chastises Paploo for telling an incredibly dark horror story of a monster lurking in the forest. Wong even pays homage to the old animated series in a tale of friendship between Ewoks and Duloks. The series of stories is a quick “read” that pays tribute to the little-regarded group of natives with a streamlined simplicity that embraces the heart of storytelling.
Garbett and Tartaglia find a warm heart to the series through a visual reality firmly rooted in the production design of the original movie, which serves as the wraparound story of Logray and company telling each other tales. Ganucheau is the perfect choice for the visual style of a story that’s inspired by the old cel animated Saturday morning series. Ganucheau takes the style of the old cartoons and makes it her own in a well-articulated tale that contrasts powerfully against the black-and-white-and-red of Hotz and Rosenberg’s monster horror story.
Wong has done an excellent job of writing a huge range of different stories for a huge range of different art styles that all managed to deliver surprisingly different moods, motions, and emotions without ever saying a single actual word. It speaks to a very impressively simple and versatile group of characters who never really achieved their full potential in the 1980s when they were created. In a modern era of endless kawaii-cute adventure characters, the Ewoks continue to show real potential for ongoing adventures in one of the more popular and enduring space fantasy worlds in the history of science fiction.
