The Hunter!

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STAR WARS — Issue no. 16, July 1978

Book: Star Wars

Issue No.: 16

Published: July 25, 1978

Title: “The Hunter!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Original paper copy

A guest artist. A standalone story. That’s right folks, looks like we got us a Star Wars fill-in issue.

Despite a promise on the cover, this book doesn’t even feature Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, or any of the other main Star Wars characters (other than in a one-page flashback). It does, however, feature Han Solo’s Seven Samurai-inspired friends from an earlier Star Wars comic book story arc.

The titular hunter here is a dude named Valance. He really hates robots. After he hears about Luke Skywalker, who is wanted by the Empire and who destroyed the Death Star with the help of droids, Valance decides he’ll hunt down Skywalker and those droids. But Valance misunderstands his intel. He thinks he can get to Skywalker through Jaxxon (who you might recall looks like a giant green rabbit). But Jaxxon, despite having worked with Han Solo and Chewbacca, doesn’t know Skywalker. He’s pals with a different farm boy, Jimm, AKA the Starkiller Kid.

When Valance and his mercenaries get to Jimm’s planet, they get outsmarted pretty quickly. The good guys lead the bad guys into an open field and then start up a Bantha stampede. All of Valance’s mercenaries get trampled. It’s pretty awesome.

A panel from this issue showing several large banthas trampling Valance’s mercenaries. One merc shouts, “Banthas!” Another says, “The crazy villagers have stampeded their herd!” Narration reads, “And the high, tangling grass is nearly impossible to run in...”

Valance escapes. But the story’s last page reveals a twist. Valance hates robots, but he’s a half-robot cyborg himself. So he’s got a pretty major self-loathing problem.

A note from the editors on the “Star-Words” fan-mail page mentions that this books was hugely popular at the time. Which makes sense. These days there are hundreds of hours of Star Wars content available on Disney+. But back in 1978, if you wanted to enjoy some Star Wars, your only options were the one movie (that could only be viewed in cinemas!), a couple of paperbacks (the Star Wars novelization and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye), and this Marvel comic book series. The editors admit that they have skipped the fan-mail page in some previous issues of Star Wars so they’d have more pages for house ads. Since the audience for the book was so large, there were a lot of eyeballs on whatever ads were featured in the book.

Next time — Spider-Man and Moon Knight versus Cyclone and the Maggia!

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