It was the 70’s. It was Marvel comics. Marvel did have a Conan comic at the time. I think Roy Thomas and some others worked on the Conan book.
And it’s not like there’s an official movie poster anywhere that makes Luke into some buff dude with a sexy Leia at his knee. 😉
Sure, but at least the Jung and Hildebrant posters gave Luke a face that resembled Mark Hamill. I just can’t shake that feeling that I’m seeing Conan in that first Marvel icon.
But of course, at this point they were doing a comic adaptation of a film that no one thought wold do particularly well, so they just added their standard Marvel-superhero flair to it.
I do really like it, I just also think it’s really funny and weird looking (but that’s part of the charm of those early SW comics).
Weird depictions of Luke actually abound in early poster concepts. I think this one only appeared in the Art Of Star Wars book.
But unlike the Marvel icon, at least none of these show Luke standing around floating in a vacuum.
Wow, that Polish one is so ugly. I mean it’s more Star wars-y than some of the other weird ones they made, but what is up with Luke’s face?
(Also you say he isn’t floating in a vacuum, true, but in this one he’s floating on a cloud, which I find really funny for some reason.)
However, while on the subject matter of funny-looking foreign SW posters; I’ve always liked this Italian one which actually kind of reminds me of a comic cover;
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And this one is also really interesting to me (it’s so fascinating to see how people just had no clue what SW was back in '77);
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This one is definitely back to Conan-Luke territory. Even Han looks a bit Conan-esque, his face is also pretty much identical to Luke. And Chewie is just straight up a gorilla.
Although it’s credited to an artist named John Solie, it looks like what I imagine a Frank Frazetta SW poster would have looked like.
And it undermines Luke being buff in ESB which was a physical example of his progression.
The funny thing is that the post-ESB icon showed a much thinner Luke.
(In all fairness though it was quite movie accurate.)IIRC, they switched to using the droids for a while, then Han and Chewie, and then finally a group shot of our heroes?
Wow, you have a good memory.
There was also two more of just Luke, and one with Leia.
Droids icon
Han & Chewie icon
Second Luke icon
Third Luke icon
Group icon
Leia icon
