click on image for full-size version.
I miss Star Wars. Sure, Star Wars is still going. We've got cartoons and games and there's the 3D re-releases starting next year, and the live action TV series is somewhere on the fringes...there's Blu Ray and the bog-standard DVD to go back to whenever you want...there's Lego, of course. The Star Wars universe is pretty much alive, even before you start craving comics and novels and T-shirts. I guess what I mean is I miss my Star Wars.
And what do I mean by that?
Star Wars has long been part of my life. I'm not quite old enough to be the generation that saw them in the cinemas first time around, but I was there for the merchandising, and the videos and the first ITV broadcasts - I remember the ITV Christmas Promo, and the camera going in on a bauble on a tree - cut to The Millennium Falcon rushing towards the screen. Oh, how the nostalgia smushes my heart. I seemed to have the action figures, your Chief Chirpa and Nien Nunb, before I really knew who or what they were. My awareness soon caught up, and Star Wars and I struck up a friendship to rival even Lando and Lobot. (They were friends, right? I mean, he was a lobotomised half-robot man, but I bet Lando still drank blue milk with him on his birthday.)
I can remember the year I got a Y-Wing Bomber for Christmas. Probably my best present ever, although I didn't really show it, being insanely jealous of my brother's Duplo Farm because it came in a much bigger box. Let's face it; I'm a dickhead and will envy almost anything. Still, I knew that I was in possession of something awesome. The thing made laser noises and when you pushed a button it released a proton torpedo! Epic.
Eventually other toys came into play. Action Force (or GI Joe - if you must) did have a pretty spectacular armoury of helicopters and ninjas, as well as being able to bend at the knees, turn at the hips, etc. My Princess Leia in Boushh disguise might have come with a plastic hat and a spear gun, but could she curtesy? Action Force could curtesy. All my Star Wars vehicles were requisitioned to this new campaign because Action Force could fit in their seats. The Star Wars figures went back in the box, all stiff-limbed, while I played with soldiers a while.
But I was not done with Star Wars, and Star Wars was not done with me.
My dad started coming home from work with little sandwich bags that had one or two Star Wars figures in them, that he'd bought at the Tuesday market in Orpington Town Hall. The universe started expanding again. Some of these figures were just...obscure... You've got to remember what other tie-in toys were like: The choice of figures from the Batman movie was something like Batman, The Joker, Bob the Goon.
What the hell can you play with these? The Joker and Bob The Goon are up to no good, but here comes Batman in his car to shoot them with a missile. Game over. Oh, The Joker and Bob The Goon are up to no good again, but here comes Batman in his jet plane to shoot them with a missile. Even something like He-Man, where there was a pretty high roster of goodies and baddies, had nothing on Star Wars. Star Wars (and Kenner) made figures of General Madine. Figures of Droopy McCool. Figures of Zuckuss. You probably didn't know these guys were even in the movies, let alone had names. So when I started getting hold of these weirder figures, Star Wars had a renaissance. My brother and I would play out semi-scripted games (after all, these were characters that had already had the adventure of their lives and *Spoiler Alert* some of them were dead) mostly centred around Admiral Ackbar dealing with robot imposters and Bounty Hunters.
Flash Forward.
In the rich mythology and expanded Universe of my own story, Paul Canova is quite a significant hero and Action Figure, as it were. Or at least he used to be. I'm in secondary school and he's in my class. Heavy-set, seemingly slow (but not) and rocking thick, bushy curls on his head, Paul was an instant cult-figure. I can't remember how we first became friends, but I do know we were in a band together - Decadence. We shared a love of Guns n' Roses, which lasted infinitely longer than my tenure in the band. One time we were talking and we both figured out the other still had a lot of love for Muscle Men (the pink plastic wrestling figures that came in plastic trash-cans, rather than beef-cake body-builder types in canary yellow Speedos.) Paul was big into WWF, and his declaration “Doink the Clown was the beginning of the end of wrestling” became a long-running mantra for me and fellow-Canova acolyte Matthew Crosby.
I went round his house to trade Muscle Men. Paul was big into action figures. He had some Star Wars. Angels sang. We carved our name in a tree with a lightsabre.
Or we played laser-tag in his big back garden and had Macaroni and Cheese, something like that.
At around that time Super Star Wars came out on the SNES, and Dark Horse Comics began running Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy’s ‘Dark Empire’ – a story set after Return of the Jedi. I’d hang out at Paul’s house and we’d play his Nintendo and read about what Luke Skywalker did next. Paul had built a Star Wars landscape in an empty room in his parents’ house. With a yellow bedsheet and some cardboard he built a pretty good Jabba’s Palace, complete with Rancor pit. Next to it, via a white bedsheet, was a Hoth scene – rebel troopers on their Tauntauns evading the Imperial menace of approaching AT-ATs. I think there was a third scene, which my memory is hazy about. Odds are it was Endor, so no doubt Paul had put a green bed sheet to good use.
I started taking Paul to the market where my dad had bought those sandwich-bagged figures, and he started taking me on trips to boot fairs and collectors markets. I wasn’t playing with these things any more...I was just collecting. The nerd gene was trying to find its outlet. I spent a modest fortune amassing new Star Wars bits and bobs – Amanaman, a Millennium Falcon still in it’s box with the stickers still on the sticker sheet, Imperial Dignitary...these were rare things. Worth owning. Honest.
I’ve already described their fates here.
I sold my Star Wars figures just before Star Wars got big again. Just before the re-releases were announced and the prequels planned. But whatever small fortune they might have gained me had I sold at the right time I would have tossed away on impulse-buy shit. I probably would have bought a set of Stone Temple Pilots picture disks. I never know what to do with money.
But collecting and owning wasn’t all there was to it. Like I said, these figures showed just how big Star Wars was - bigger than Luke and Leia and Han and Vader. The comic books and the new novels showed there was so much more to it.
So Paul and I decided to join in.
Back then Paul was one of the best artists I knew. I don’t know what happened to that talent – perhaps squandered, but half-my-life ago I envied it. When you draw, (you at home, the reader) do you ever do that kind of back-and-forth motion as you draw a line? That sketch movement as you just pencil and perfect a curve? That used to mystify Paul. He would just commit to the line and draw it in one movement. I have a drawing by him, of a Tusken Raider, drawn on a scrap of paper in class, some fifteen years ago, that I just could not recreate today without careful planning. The dynamic pose, the fore-shortening of the arms in perspective, the accuracy of the face-mask. He just did it all in five minutes while Po Perkins or whoever was harping on about BODMAS.
Paul wanted to do a comic. I was to write it and he was going to draw it. It was going to be about Bounty Hunters, obviously. It occurs to me now that I got my first real set of writer’s notes from Paul – I had written a sequence in the Cantina bar where I’d cribbed as much detail from ‘Technical Manuals’ as I could – what drinks were served, where the tables were, who worked there – and Paul just came back to me with ‘What’s the story?’
What’s the story?
Nothing ever came of the comic. Paul and I moved on and grew up (after a fashion). He evolved into a punk and a stoner and once I hit Uni he sort of faded from existence. He was a drummer in a friend’s band for a while. I'm told a 'Paul Canova' called TalkSport the other day. I’m sure I could find out what became of him if I really wanted, but I quite like how he’s moved on into myth and I don’t really want to spoil it with anything so boring as truth.
As for me...well, I never could figure out what happened to me, that’s why I write shit like this to try and make sense of it. I still love Star Wars, very much. I will even defend the prequels – up to a point. I still want to write comics and draw comics and given half-the-chance I’d probably play with toys if I’d brought any to Liverpool. I miss being on the top bunk, my brother on the other and my dad coming home and handing us those figures. I miss the prospect of a Y-Wing for Christmas. I miss Paul and me putting together the scraps we could find – before Google – of our nerdy gold rush. Never having to worry about being a failure, or making ends meet. Never having to worry about fitting in.
Back then I was always cool enough to hang with Han Solo.
These days... At least I drew Boba Fett, eh? Boba Fett’s cool. It’s not like I went and drew Dengar.
0 comments:
Post a Comment