Retro Fett Comic Review: “Jawas of Doom”

“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.” –Erma Bombeck

Join Cujos’ jour­ney as he reviews all Boba-centric comics that dropped before “Star Wars Episode 2″. So for­get the future because life is too short not to live in the past. Meet old-school Boba as no one has ever looked at him. Revel in my inane obser­va­tions. With­out fur­ther ado, I give you…

Star Wars 81: Jawas of Doom (March 1984)

Tal­ent Role Call:
Writer: Mary Jo Duffy
Artists: Ron Frenz (pen­cils), Tom Palmer / Tom Mandrake(ink), Gly­nis Wein (color)

Get to know Mary Jo Duffy! Traviss, Bul­loch, Logan. These are all Fett house hold names; let’s add another to that list. Star Wars Comic #81 is the first appear­ance of Fett since his unfor­tu­nate plunge into the Sar­lacc, which makes “Jo Duffy” the woman that would raise Boba from the grave. How­ever inaus­pi­cious the appear­ance may be, Fett fans should rec­og­nize the woman that revived Boba Fett. This is the first comic to drop after RotJ.Comic Pack 411: This comic was given the hon­ored treat­ment of a Wal­mart exclu­sive comic pack — includ­ing a reprint of the comic and fig­ures of “Goo” cov­ered Boba And RA-7 droid.

Cover Art: Well the cover is noth­ing if not clas­sic Star Wars art. A col­lage of the char­ac­ters grace the cover. An ade­quate cover, for­get­table if not for Boba who can be seen strik­ing a famil­iar pose. 2.5 Dis­in­te­gra­tions

Star Wars Time­line: This comic opens the morn­ing after the destruc­tion of the sec­ond Death Star. The Rebels have just par­tied the evening away on the for­est moon of Endor — appar­ently there is no party like an Ewok party.

Boba by the Num­bers: Num­ber of times he is mis­taken for a droid: 3
Num­ber of times he fires a gun: 1, on the last page of the comic I might add
Num­ber of times he lifts R2-D2 above his head: 1

Comic Sum­mary: This is a Han-centric comic. While Luke, Wedge, and Lando are shak­ing off a heavy night of par­ty­ing with the ewoks. Solo is con­cerned with one thing: get­ting his money right. It seems that Solo is a lit­tle light on cred­its and is gen­er­ally feel­ing rest­less. Leia is quick to loan Han some money, but any self respect­ing scoundrel wont accept hand outs! So its off to col­lect some cred­its from where else…Tatooine.

Mean­while a cer­tain bounty hunter has lib­er­ated him­self from a cer­tain Sar­lacc and his uncon­scious body is col­lected by some scav­eng­ing Jawas. Han’s attempts to col­lect his cred­its are denied and as he grows more irri­tated he real­izes that R2-D2 is miss­ing, appar­ently some Jawas have taken the adven­tur­ous droid. Raise your hand if you think Boba and R2 end up in the same sand­crawler. After some grand theft land­speeder, Solo and Leia catch up with our sticky fin­gered Jawas. Solo makes his way on to the Sand­crawler and is con­fronted by an amnesia-stricken Fett. I won’t waste your time with the details of their con­fronta­tion, but I will tell you that Fett ends up help­ing Solo and R2 to free­dom while deposit­ing him­self back into the Sar­lacc. Yes, back in the Sar­lacc. Mak­ing this some­thing of a cycli­cal comic, of super­flu­ous events.

Redun­dancy 411: It is unclear if the events in the story “A Barve Like That,” one of the sto­ries in the book Tales from Jabba’s Palace (1995), and this comic are com­pan­ion pieces. They don’t ref­er­ence each other. The gen­eral con­sen­sus is that the events in the book are canon and this comic is not.

Fett/Solo insight: Might as well dis­cuss Solo as well as Fett here, since they are seem­ingly two sides to the same coin. The issues in this comic are some­what mature in regards to Han Solo (as most of us can relate to): being a lit­tle short on cash. This prob­lem seems to bring out the worst in Solo as he “bor­rows” a cou­ple of land­speed­ers even­tu­ally wreck­ing them. And his over­all demeanor in the comic is rat­tled and with­out his cin­e­matic swagger.

On to the Fett man, well, it’s tough to really dis­cuss Fett on account of his amne­sia. So lets talk about that!

“Hi my name is Amne­sia”: There are two types of amne­sia — Antero­grade, Ret­ro­grade (which is what Fett has in this comic) and even “explo­sive amne­sia” in Futurama.

• Amne­sia is com­mon device in fic­tion often used quite slop­pily, Revan, Boba even C3-PO (via mem­ory wipe) are on the short list of star wars char­ac­ters that have been expe­ri­enced it.
• List of top gross­ing movies that are cen­tered around Amne­sia (boxofficemojo.com)

Reader Par­tic­i­pa­tion! In the com­ment sec­tion below, feel free to add your favorite fic­tional char­ac­ter that has had amnesia!

OK, back to Boba. For the major­ity of his appear­ance, Boba is out of it. The Jawas and an RA-7 droid spec­u­late if he is a droid or cyborg. When Fett does come around, he is hold­ing his head in con­fu­sion won­der­ing what is going on. After Fett’s mem­ory is jogged he snaps into action, but it’s too late.

Ran­dom Comic 411

• Since the death of Jabba, Jawas have become increas­ingly aggressive.
• The ewok vil­lage is called “Bright Tree Vil­lage” … groan
• Gar­rick is an alouf mechanic in the space port of Mos Eisley.

Comic Epi­logue: Rather than dis­sect­ing the art in the comic or the story sep­a­rately I will kill two birds with one: WTF. A comic is a bal­ance between art and story this comic seems to care very lit­tle about either. The char­ac­ters like­ness from Solo to Fett are some­what sloppy and to be hon­est not really on par for this era of comic book. There are a few frames of decent Boba action but it is a fail.

The story itself is not bad but as they say “the devil is in the details,” and these details are sus­pect to say the least, here is one exam­ple: An entire sand crawler falls into the Sar­lacc, logis­ti­cally that’s kinda impos­si­ble. There are many other events in the comic that leave a dis­cern­ing reader at a loss but I’m done here. Over­all grade: 1.5 Disintegrations

Should you hunt this comic down? Ummm, no. just no.

Next month…Wiz­ard Spe­cial #1/2 ‘Salvage’