For those of us of a certain age, it was about the only thing to tide us over before Empire came out, and between seeing the original at the theater again!
I didn't have a local comic shop near me as a kid, so I was often at the mercy and whim of the local drugstore having the next issue in stock. A month could seem an eternity!
They used one of the background Mos Eisely aliens for Jabba, mainly because nobody knew what Jabba was supposed to look like. The perils of adapting a movie that wasn't finished yet, (and working mostly from still photos) also meant we got all the deleted scenes.
The same thing happened with Empire, as the first paperback printing features a very different Yoda than we saw in the movie.
It's ironic that around the time of the Special Editions, Dark Horse reprinted the movie adaptation with really horrible recoloring. I'm glad I managed to hold onto my original issues all these years, though I'm afraid to handle them too much now!