Dark Horse Comics; $99.99

Huge hits don’t happen automatically or overnight, even for George Lucas. A few years before the first Star Wars movie (now retroactively known as Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope) hit theaters in 1977, Lucas wrote his first draft of what he called The Star Wars. Until Dark Horse undertook turning that very different story into a comic book series, that version had never been seen.

In this take, you’ll see familiar names, places and concepts that are definitely very different than the ones to which everyone has grown accustomed. There are also many elements that didn’t make the cut in what evolved into Episode IV. There are, though, several familiar themes.

Writer Jonathan Rinzler, artist Mike Mayhew, colorist Rain Beredo, and cover artist Nick Runge did a superb job making it all into a highly readable eight-issue mini-series, and now Dark Horse has collected it into multiple editions. The hardcover collects issues #1–#8 and issue #0 (which was a behind-the-scenes look at the series), while the soft cover omits the #0.

The deluxe oversized boxed-set edition, though, has all the bells and whistles. It is a thing of beauty, perhaps the nicest presentation Dark Horse has ever produced. It contains the full story, the #0 issue, and numerous extras in the form of three deluxe, foil-stamped, hardcover volumes contained in a book-shaped outer box.