This is, after all, the 22nd volume of Fantagraphics' beautiful collection of the strip, which means they have at this point had 22 different people write introductions to the books, each doing a pretty good job at getting at what makes Schulz's work on the strip so special.
The strips collected herein are, as the years on the cover indicate, from relatively late in Peanuts' lifetime. I was in high school at the time they original ran, and an avid newspaper reader...at least of the comics pages and film and music reviews.
During its 50-year lifespan then, Peanuts managed to be remarkably consistent with its timelessness, focusing on the core aspects of childhood that never change much, rather than the more transient, surface level aspects.
Schulz obviously had wells he returned to over and over again over the decades, and you probably unconsciously think of some of them when you think of Peanuts, like Lucy pulling away the football or Snoopy vs. The Red Baron or the kite-eating tree and so on.
Here Donald, who Okano draws far simpler, cuter and more duck-like in build than he is usually depicted, has a monotonous office job with the Duck Furniture manufacturing company, with his friends Jose and Panchito working under him. After one too many screw-ups—most likely the time they took the company president's car for a joy ride—they are banished to the newly-created Asia Relations Department.
I think the book meets its goals effectively, although honestly the most fun part of the book for me was seeing Okano's drastically different take on the classic Donald Duck design and the way his attitude and emotions get translated into and then depicted in manga rather than Western-style comics.
It is, of course, a comedy, a kinda sorta parody of cop show tropes...once it actually gets going, anyway.
It should go without saying that it is very much not the sort of thing that DC Comics usually publishes, especially these days, as the publisher's output continues to contract more and more to their core model of telling stories either featuring their long-lived superheroes and other IP or set in the shared-universe/continuity or, preferably, both. (The publisher's last remaining imprint Vertigo, which would occasionally still publish creator-owned and non-superhero fare in its waning days, shut down in 2020...although last I heard, DC was hoping to revive it.)
Sasquatch Detective seems like the sort of comic that might we have seen from a smaller, more diverse, more adventurous publisher, one that specializes in lighter-hearted fare and comedic comic books. So how did it end up at DC anyway?
Well, Stilwell pens a brief five-paragraph introduction to this special, which is comprised of both new material and previously published shorts. The character was originally conceived of on an improv stage, she writes, becoming a "go to character...on stages all over town, eventually anchoring a grad show at Second City Hollywood." (As to where the idea for the character came from, Stilwell writes that her inspiration was essentially Charlie's Angels + a yeti.)
Apparently, several DC Comics employees saw Stilwell preforming the character on stage (DC moved to California in 2015, remember), and the publisher eventually invited her to transform the Sasquatch Detective bit into a series of short comics. Drawn by Gustavo Vazquez, these appeared as a back-up strip in Mark Russell, Mike Feehan, Mark Morales and company's 2018 six-issue series Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles.
Back-up strips can be awkward in 21st century serial comics publishing, now that just about everything that gets published as a comic book series ends up getting collected and re-published as a trade paperback later. Often such strips don't quite fit in with the feature stories of the title they were originally published in and thus don't always end up in the same trades. (I never flipped-through the Snagglepuss collection, so I don't know with certainty that Sasquatch Detective wasn't collected at the back of it, but it doesn't appear that it was, from what I see online.)
So what was DC to do with Stillwell and Vazquez's comics after Snagglepuss finished its run? They apparently decided to attach the 30-ish or so pages worth of shorts to a brand-new 30-page origin story and publish them as a big, fat, expensive special which is, of course, what we're looking at here. It seems like a somewhat half-hearted strategy.
If they just wanted to collect the back-ups they already had, after all, they could have released a 32-page comic. If they wanted new material, they could have commissioned a Sasquatch Detective mini-series...or perhaps moved the strip into another book to serve as its back-up. This just seems like something of an odd compromise of strategies, and a publishing decision all but guaranteed not to succeed, at least not from DC, which doesn't have the best track record of books that don't feature their heroes or other IP in some form. (Stilwell does seem to make a few attempts to situate her character in the DCU proper in the shorts; Wonder Woman appears in a few panels in one of them, while Catwoman and Alfred make unlikely cameos in another.)
Now, if you read EDILW religiously, then you know I did not read Snagglepuss (or else you already would have read my review of it), and thus this was my first exposure to Stilwell's character and the resultant comic. I, naturally, read the comic straight-through, from beginning to end, as it was published, although I'm not sure that order necessarily served the material best, as we get a very long origin story, five times longer than each of the original strips, before we get to the re-presentation of those strips, which actually seem to work better not knowing Tonya's origin.
After all, the very absurdism of the concept, spelled out in the title, is the strongest joke on display here. There just randomly being a detective who is also a sasquatch works better without knowing where Tonya's interest in police work came from or what her life as a regular, jobless sasquatch was like. (The central joke is especially effective since Tonya's police career seems to involve a lot of undercover work, despite the fact that she's eight-feet tall and covered in hair.)
Fourteen years ago, a caption tells us, Tonya and her family were hanging outside a forest ranger station, watching the likes of Law & Order, Reno 911! and CSI through the window. The sasquatch family, who can all talk and all wear bits and pieces of people clothes, then head to a nearby country club where they meet up with other forest animals (all of whom also talk and wear people clothes) and they all play tennis and golf together.
It's a pretty peaceful, idyllic life, despite the occasional interactions with humans, like the campers Tonya's dad scares off in one scene (he seems to ditch his pants and sweater vest before doing so, of course), or the hunters who capture her dad and briefly hold him captive in the back of their pickup truck until Tonya, her mother and her brother rescue him.
Then one day 14 years later, Tonya and her pigeon friend (who can talk, but doesn't wear clothes) catch the news on the ranger station TV, and a Los Angeles policeman says the following: "I want the best of the best for my Los Angeles police force. The best men, the best women. Hell, I'd even take a sasquatch. I don't care as long as they're the best!"
Tonya takes this unusual statement as a sign to apply and, lo and behold, she gets the job, striding confidently (and naked) into the Los Angeles police academy.
Thus ends the origin story, entitled "Origin Story" and drawn by Ron Randall rather than Vazquez. From there, the second half of the book picks up a year later, with Tonya and partner Detective Berkass already on the job and reminiscing about their many adventures.
Tonya solves a cold case and has terrible bowel distress after eating a two-day-old egg salad sandwich. She attempts to interview a witness but runs afoul of a Fish and Wildlife rep. She goes undercover, first at a spa, and then as a magician's assistant.
The main character was apparently designed by artist Ben Caldwell—the book ends with a four-page section labeled "Concept Art and Sketches by Ben Caldwell"—who also contributes the cover to the special. His sasquatch is much slimmer than the sort one generally sees sasquatches depicted as in various media, and original artist Vazquez follows through with those design choices, giving us a sasquatch who is very tall and hairy, but not too terribly squatchy. She's particularly lithe, sports four clawed digits on her hands and (regularly sized) feet, and has a full head of long hair, in addition to the fur all over her body.
Randall, drawing Tonya and her family in the opening origin story, gives us a quartet of sasquatches that are similarly tall and thin, with long hair atop their heads, and they look a little like big-eyed lion people with almost fox-like limbs.
Overall, I like the design quite a bit for how different it is, and Vazquez seems to have fun cramming it into the generic LA cop settings and stories in the back-half of the book, drawing Tonya nearly folded in half as she squeezes into the passenger seat of her partner's car, dwarfing her regular-human peers when she stands at full-height, or barely changing her look when she goes undercover, donning a blonde wig or floppy sun hat and heels.
Whatever DC's plans for the character and the material might have originally been, they seem to have stopped with this special, as there has been no reappearance by Tonya in the last six years. Perhaps she lives on as a character in Stilwell's stage work...?
After that, Jo Duffy, credited as Mary Jo Duffy in the credits for issue #70, takes over, and she will script the majority of this collection's 500 or so remaining pages. Most of these pages will be drawn by Tom Palmer, credited with either finishes or inks and mostly working over breakdowns by Ron Frenz.
Other familiar names pop up in the credits, too. Klaus Janson draws and colors Star Wars King Size Annual #3, a complete Duffy-written story about two adventurous young locals who ultimately take two completely different paths after the war between the Empire and the rebels comes to their home planet. David Mazzucchelli pencils one issue (which Palmer inks), though I can't say his work was particularly recognizable as his, and Tom Mandrake shares a "finishes" credit with Palmer on one issue, and his style did seem a little more recognizable to my eye, although that might just be because I'm more familiar with his work.
For the most part, Duffy's plots are split between the main characters looking for Han and running various missions for the alliance, many of these involving tracking down a lost rebel with important information. One is an extended flashback, featuring Han along with the rest of the characters.
In these, she introduces several original characters who would recur throughout her run, including a three-person crew of rogues, a water-breathing character from an ocean world, and an old enemy of Lando's named Drebbel, whose presence and enmity with Lando would lead to a pretty great pay off in the final issue in this collection.
Duffy does a fine job of keeping the series going and the characters convincingly engaged in other adventures despite the fact that we all know these comics are essentially just killing time, waiting for Jedi. Palmer's art is consistently great, as he's able to achieve pretty remarkable likenesses of the actors playing the stars without them ever seeming overly stiff, unnatural or not of a piece with the art they are part of.
It's also fun in the way these early Star Wars comics so often are; with so few adaptations extant at that point, creators had a lot more freedom to invent whatever kinds of aliens, ships, droids, planets and technology they wanted, meaning this version of Star Wars can look and feel delightfully off or, if you prefer, new or original (Though not quite so much as the earlier comics, like some of those discussed below).
This collection includes Marvel's official four-issue comics adaptation of Return of the Jedi, adapted not by the regulalr comic's creative team, but by Archie Goodwin and artists Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon. I had actually read this in a magazine format as a very young child—I would have been six when it came out in 1983, so it was probably among the earliest comics I had ever read. It's...not very interesting, and I ended up skimming through it here. It's obviously quite faithful to the movie, but the action's condensed, and the artists don't do anything particularly cool or fun with the material, instead presenting it as straight as possible (Which, one imagines, was what they were supposed to do).
After Jedi, the series continued, of course, and here is where I think the comic should prove particularly fascinating again. With no new films on the horizon, and George Lucas apparently done with them (and relatively few novels establishing what might happen next), Marvel seemingly had pretty free reign to do whatever they wanted with the characters and established lore, this series presenting some of the earliest "more Star Wars", unencumbered by the need to wait for plotlines to be resolved.
There are only five post-Jedi issues collected in this volume, though, and they seem rather all over the place, as Marvel and Duffy seemed to still be casting about for a new direction.
The first issue following the Jedi adaptation hews pretty closely to following up on the events of the film. The rebels are still based on Endor, and Han Solo and Leia travel to Tatooine to try to unfreeze Han's bank account, which was suspended when he was in suspended animation. There, we learn that Boba Fett was spit out from the Sarlacc pit, found and collected by Jawas who think his armor means he's a droid and, by issue's end, winds up back in the Sarlacc pit.
Two other stories read like they might have been inventory stories. One is a solo Lando story (by writer Linda Grant and McLeod) that, based on the designs and nature of the story, could have been a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers story, the other (by writer Roy Richardson, Mazzucchelli and Palmer) features Han Solo hunting for treasure; this a rather fun story as it involves him exploring an ancient temple, calling to mind Han Solo-as-Indiana Jones.
The other two involve the various characters taking on missions throughout the galaxy, their new goal being inviting planets to attend a big meeting to form some kind of new, post-Empire galactic government. In these, Duffy brings back characters introduced earlier in the series and gives us a couple of payoffs.
There's one more volume left in the A Long Time Ago... series, which will collect the remaining 21 issues of the original series. I'm really looking forward to that, as its contents will be entirely made up of these post-Jedi stories.
Hopefully it won't take me a decade or so to get to reading it...
The organizing principle for this particular omnibus seems to be stuff that didn't fit in thematically with any of their other Star Wars collections, leading to a, well, wild selection of comics, most of which hadn't originated with or been previously collected by Dark Horse.
That means there's a great deal of original material from Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly, Star Wars Monthly and Empire Strikes Back Monthly, circa 1979-1982, as well as comics from the pages of Marvel's Pizzazz and Scholastic's Star Wars Kids magazine (from the late '70s and late '90s, respectively), plus three issues of the not-very-good Star Wars 3-D from publisher Blackthorne Publishing, a handful of mini-comics that appear to have been pack-ins with a '90s toy line and even a four-panel comic strip that ran on a box of Kellogg's cereal.
What had originally attracted me to this collection wasn't that I was a Star Wars comics completist or anything. (This was the only Star Wars Omnibus I had purchased aside from the various A Long Time Ago... collections of the original Marvel comics). Rather, it was the name Alan Moore on the back cover. His was perhaps the most prominent of several rather famous names listed there and, given both his reputation and the quality of just about every comic of his I had managed to read, I was more than a little curious to see what he might have done with the Star Wars characters.
As for the other creators involved with the comics in this collection, it's a real who's who of comics talent, including Mike W. Barr, Howard Chaykin, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Alan Davis, Tony DeZuniga, Gary Erskine, Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino, Klaus Janson, Steve Moore, Ron Randall, Walt Simonson, Ken Steacy, John Stokes, Roy Thomas and Len Wein.
If you are a fan of any of the gentleman listed above, particularly of the artists, please be advised that, for the most part, this is work from pretty early in their careers with Marvel, so while the promise of a Howard Chaykin or Walt Simonson Star Wars comic is exciting, they aren't necessarily working at the height of their powers here, and their rather brief contributions to the book don't find them at their Howard Chaykin-est or Walt Simonson-est. (Carmine Infantino is an outlier here; he contributes hundreds of pages, and they are both amazing and recognizably his, rather than mundane work for hire bound by drawing celebrity likenesses and studio-approved vehicles and settings).
As for the Moore material, which is perhaps among the best written here, it is, obviously, not exactly the Star Wars equivalent of he and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen...and not just because he wasn't working with Gibbons.
Rather his stories—three drawn by John Stokes, one by Alan Davis and one by Adolfo Buylla—are all mostly quite short, four of the five ranging from five to six pages each.
As such, there is not entirely too much to these, and they amount to usually clever strips with either quite a bit of writerly narration or, in one case, quite a bit of dialogue, much of it approaching the purple (In this volume, it's instructive to compare Moore's work with that of Chris Claremont, as they share some similarities, although I don't think many ever find occasion to group those two writers together).
They are also relatively light on Star Wars content, although they star Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and C-3PO and R2-D2. The characterization involved is generally one of types, for example, presenting Vader as the blackest, most unconscionable sort of villain, or focusing on Luke's nature as a prototypical hero figure. The one featuring Leia and some Storm Troopers running across some space gods is only incidentally a Star Wars story; almost any characters could have been used in their place.
For the most part, these shorts—which Dark Horse had actually colorized and reprinted along with Moore's single, longer story in 1996 under the title Classic Star Wars: Devilworlds #1 and #2—basically read like some of Moore's earlier works for British anthology comics or, perhaps more directly, the various DC Comics shorter works most recently collected in 2015 as DC Universe by Alan Moore. (One story even prefigures Moore and Gibbons' famous Green Lantern short "Mogo Doesn't Socialize", featuring as it does a sentient planet coming to life to defend itself from hostile invaders.)
As for that longer story, it is the 15-page "The Pandora Effect," in which Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca find themselves captive on a strange, extra-dimensional ship crewed by evil-worshipping occultists who intend to torture and kill them, until Chewbacca releases a prehistoric otherworldly demonic entity that the bad guys had imprisoned. It's notably mature for a Star Wars story of this era, but, again, it's not so much a Star Wars story as a rather generic sci-fi story in which the Star Wars characters are dropped in.
Another particularly strong story in the collection is from another Moore, Steven Moore. This is "Death-Masque," in which the Empire releases an incredible, terrifying weapon upon Luke, a small creature that looks like a monkey with a skull for a head, lights glowing from its empty sockets. The creature, which is kept hooded like a hawk, is basically an alien answer to folklore surrounding sleep paralysis, as it squats on the chest of its victim, projecting nightmares into the victim's head. Here, that means Luke wandering around a Stokes-drawn planet filled with skulls of various sizes and bone trees while watching his friends die and ultimately dueling against a skull-faced Darth Vader.
Again, it's not too terribly Star Wars-y a story...but then, that is a large part of the fun of the earliest years of Star Wars comics. With what we now think of as the established lore of that fictional universe then so scant and pre-formed—limited, as it was, to just what was in that first movie—the writers and artists had no real choice but to make up things as they went along. Planets, aliens, droids, ships, costumes, even the characters' histories and inter-personal relationships...at that point, it was all still up for grabs, and so the creators had to more-or-less treat the characters as types, and send them into the sorts of space and fantasy adventures of old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, the very things George Lucas had taken his own inspiration from (The serial nature of comics, of course, proved the most perfect vehicle for such stories, even if the emerging Star Wars novels offered better, more rewarding reading).
I take great pleasure in these wild, untamed Star Wars comics, especially now that the fictional setting has been so rigorously chronicled, standardized and mapped out, seemingly every conceivable empty space or opening filled in (And, after the third trilogy scrambled so much of what was previously regarded as canon, re-filled in).
We find such stories aplenty here, mostly in the form of what I guess must have been strips original to Marvel UK's titles, written first by Goodwin and then, later, by Claremont, all drawn by Infantino in his own slightly strange style, with off-kilter action, blocky figures and seeming complete disregard for likenesses or the film's design (Infantino's Chewbacca especially, like almost everybody's at the time, is often quite off-model. The only way to really guess his Luke is Luke is his answering to the name and occasionally wielding a light saber, and Infantino's extremely curvy version of Leia is mostly identifiable by her signature hair style, taken from the original film and worn almost religiously throughout the comics he draws here).
These are even more fun when Goodwin does attempt to address the continuity of the film, as in one story set immediately after the destruction of the Death Star, in which the "toasts" came "often and exuberantly" and "there may have been moments when the partying threatened to get completely out of hand..."
That last bit of narration comes in a panel of Leia kissing Han, followed immediately by a panel in which she kisses Luke, who of course Goodwin and company didn't know (and Lucas himself probably didn't know at that point either) would end up being brother and sister (That's not the only time they kiss in these comics either).
Oh, and Leia also gives Chewbacca his medal after the kissing; so there's that curious loose end from the film tied-up, all the way back in 1979!
Goodwin and Infantino also tell us of the Kessel Run and just how Leia got to be such a crack shot with a blaster (given that she was a princess/senator from a pacifist planet), before Claremont replaces Goodwin and comes aboard for a rather epic story that adds a Black female rebel to Luke, Leia and the droids' small crew and then sends them all to a volcano planet where they are forced to ally themselves with an contingent of Imperial commandos.
Once we hit the late '80s and the pages give over to American comics that now have a whole, completed trilogy (and its various mass media tie-ins) to work with as source material, the comics tend to get a little less crazy...and less fun.
The three-issue 3-D series written by Len Wein, and here presented in black and white, features stories in which Luke returns to Tatooine to find someone new to run the family moisture farm; Luke, Han, Chewbacca and the droids scout out Hoth for a possible rebel base; and Luke being seduced to the power of the Dark Side by Vader from afar.
Here we see not only an adherence to plotlines from the films, but even the types of aliens have settled into the now-familiar races, with a group of bandits on Hoth all made-up of various races introduced in Return of the Jedi.
And by the time we get to the Star Wars Kids comics, everything seems to be produced to fit into a by then tightly regulated canon.
Seen as a supplement to A Long Time Ago... (and a chance to see Infantino's Star Wars art in glorious black and white, where you can appreciate the linework of the artist and his partners like Gene Day and Steve Mitchell more), or a chance to see what Alan Moore might have done with the storied franchise or simply as a collection of some of the most oddball Star Wars comics that one can't find anywhere else, it's a particularly rewarding collection.
Um, too bad it's now been out of print so long now (Maybe I should have read and reviewed it sooner than a dozen years after it was published, I guess).
I'm not sure if Marvel has republished any of this material since they reacquired the Star Wars license, and, if so, where, but it looks like this omnibus may still be available via Kindle, if you don't mind supporting Amazon in these trying times of ours.
