Wow, these are pretty awesome.
(That Marvel adaptation must have been a pretty big deal back in the day. It’s interesting that they reprinted the American comics. I was under the impression that the Japanese preferred to make their own version of American characters when it came to comics/manga?)
Also I wasn’t aware that Ohrai had done more than just the ESB poster.
In Japan there have been both manga-style reinterpretations as well as just straight forward translations of American comics. For example in the '70s Kobunsha published Japanese translations of several Marvel comics as trade paperbacks including Thor, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and I know that nowadays a lot of Marvel and DC’s trade paperbacks of recent storylines get Japanese translated editions (for example Civil War).
In the '90s there were some manga adaptations of the Star Wars trilogy, which were later released in the US in English, but the first Star Wars comic in Japan was actually the Marvel one. They didn’t even flip the pages! When you get to the part of the magazine with the Star Wars comic you have to jump forward several pages to get to the beginning of the story, and then start reading left-to-right instead of the usual Japanese right-to-left.
The Marvel adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back was also released in Japan, in book form, although I don’t know if it was serialized in a magazine like Star Wars was:
