Lucas' original galaxy conceived in 'The Star Wars'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Exclusive: 'The Star Wars' trailer An exclusive trailer for Dark Horse Comics' "The Star Wars" by writer J.W. Rinzler and artist Mike Mayhew.

%27The Star Wars%27 is an adaptation of George Lucas 1974 rough draft of the %27Star Wars%27 screenplay

Darth Vader is a military general and not the half-man%2C half-machine seen in Lucas%27 movie trilogy

Han Solo fans will see him as a green alien lizard instead of looking like Harrison Ford

Luke Skywalker as an old, gray-haired general? Darth Vader as just a dude? Han Solo — secret-agent lizard?

The new Dark Horse Comics series The Star Wars sounds like alternate-universe weirdness for fans of George Lucas' influential sci-fi franchise. Instead, it's just the filmmaker's first pass at his galaxy far, far away.

The eight-issue comic launching Sept. 4 is an adaptation of Lucas' first rough draft from May 1974 of a story that imagines galactic drama between an all-encompassing Empire, the fledgling rebel alliance forming to fight it, an ancient order of Jedi and the evil Sith warriors tapped to wipe out those Jedi.

"You can teach a college course on how he got from that story to his first Star Wars film" in 1977, says The Star Wars writer J.W. Rinzler, an executive editor at LucasBooks.

"Francis Ford Coppola read the rough draft and thought it was pretty good. He wasn't really sure why George was changing it."

If it were made today, says series artist Mike Mayhew, The Star Wars "would hold its own against The Avengers and Avatar."

Compared to the original Star Wars blockbuster, it's a much different beast.

Overall themes and archetypes are similar, but there are some tweaks: Princess Leia still needs saving; the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 (who actually talks) are around, as is the Wookiee Chewbacca; and the Jedi mentor-apprentice relationship of Obi-Wan Kenobi and farmboy Luke Skywalker is replaced by that of wizened war vet Luke Skywalker and farmboy Annikin Starkiller.

Mayhew likens it to a prototype screenplay for Citizen Kane written by Orson Welles where Charles Foster Kane is a railroad tycoon instead of a newspaperman. "But, the prototype version was just as engaging, if not more so, than the masterpiece that Welles filmed."

The comic shows definite evolution between that first draft and when Lucas rolled film on the first Star Wars. "He wouldn't really revise scripts as much as rewrite them," Rinzler says.

There is an Emperor, but he's a politician and not a Sith lord. Same with Darth Vader, a general in the Imperial army — the infamous bad guy moviegoers know is actually an amalgam of the military figure and two other characters in The Star Wars, including a "man-machine" and a Sith, "who all have elements of Vader we all know and love," says Mayhew, who is working with colorist Rain Beredo.

Lightsabers are nonexistent — in The Star Wars, everybody wields "lazer swords," Rinzler says. "They're just like swords in a Robin Hood movie. The Jedi and Sith just happen to be a lot better at using theirs.''

In the familiar Star Wars universe, the Jedi are a mostly celibate group. In The Star Wars comic, Rinzler teases a scene where Annikin sees a good-looking Imperial female aide "and he's immediately trying to flirt with her. He's almost got some of the half Han Solo stuff going on in his character."

Solo is the most intriguing variation of them all. When readers meet this reptilian version of the classic rogue, he wears a vest, but that's where the similarities end. A "worldly" and exotic gunslinger, Solo is already a rebel agent and "a very mysterious pirate that lurks in the shadows," Mayhew says.

Rinzler figures it wasn't just natural selection that made Lucas turn him from lizard to Harrison Ford over the course of a couple years — a hairy Wookiee was hard enough to film much less a giant green alien.

"I'm sure he (Lucas) knew quite well in 1974 that there was no way you could film this script," Rinzler adds. "He changes locales sometimes twice on a page. Any studio head reading that would have just had a heart attack. He would have thrown it in the garbage by the time he got to page 20."

The coolest thing for hardcore Star Wars nuts like Mayhew is seeing the compelling and emotional characters — he says more happens to them "in the first 15 minutes of The Star Wars than happens in the entire Star Wars movie."

And for more casual fans, the artist adds, ''this is the greatest 'what if?' story ever in comics."