Dark Horse to adapt original ‘The Star Wars’ script into comic series

Disney’s Star Wars films won’t begin hitting theaters until 2015, but we’ll get to see a new, George Lucas-written Star Wars saga even earlier than that. Dark Horse Comics is releasing an eight-issue series based on the original 1974 screenplay for Star Wars. The comic should be a much different adventure than the beloved A New Hope however, as the original The Star Wars treatment that Lucas wrote had quite a few differences: Han Solo was an alien, lightsabers were “lazer swords,” and Anakin Skywalker was named “Annikin Starkiller.” The comics will begin to debut this September.

The project is being written by an executive editor at Lucasbooks, and it’s illustrated by Mike Mayhew, an artist who has previously worked on Marvel’s Avengers: End Times. Mayhew wrote on Twitter that the upcoming comic will be completely faithful to the original screenplay, and that it is, “incredibly action packed with complex characters we’ve never met before!” Mayhew’s excitement is encouraging, but the last screenplays we saw from Lucas didn’t turn out so well.