Peasant vs. Imperialist… plus a Monkey

by Admiral Fartmore

Over the last year, American popular discourse on China has reached a level of negativity that is normally reserved only for popular film franchises. As such, we thought it would be great to examine a work where these two worlds collide: a 1980 Chinese knockoff comic book called “Star Wars,” which is best described as a 150 panel retelling of A New Hope written by people who only watched snippets of the film.

Credit for discovering this old ripoff goes to Maggie Greene, who found a dilapidated copy while doing unrelated research in China. The original version assigned to me was in Chinese, and I was really excited to take on the task of translating it… but then a quick search revealed it had already been done. So credit to Nick Stember for his translation here, available here if you want to take a look yourself.



The story is a very simple retelling of Star Wars, and there’s not too much crazy there. But as a comic, this thing is pretty bad. Characters and ships are drawn inconsistently throughout, resulting in a confusing panel-by-panel narrative. For example, Princess Leia looks different in nearly every appearance:

The writing is silly, with lines like “Vader’s suit was black, but his heart was even blacker,” but that’s pretty par for the course when it comes to Star Wars, so I actually commend them for sticking to the source material there. But that doesn’t excuse getting so many key details wrong, like drawing the millennium falcon as a real-world stealth bomber, or presenting Darth Vader in a Wonder Woman suit next to a dead triceratops.

The Millennium Falcon with Chinese characteristics.

I wonder how many young boys in 1980s Beijing felt a little something stir inside when they saw that pair of bazookas on Lord Vader.

But at the same time, a lot of things right. The story follows roughly the same beats as A New Hope, which leads me to believe that the writer knew the movie much better than the illustrators did. Sure, the tie fighters look like tiny boats and Darth Vader looks like Mr. Sparkle, but at least the Death Star and the X Wings and the Death Star look pretty good.

This leads me to believe that the artists had a limited range of references to work off, or that there may have been multiple groups of artists working on this at different times. How could you be so close with an X-Wing and so far off on a tie fighter? There’s only one illustrator credited, but I find that suspect. Anyway.

There’s a lot about Star Wars that fits a Chinese literary tradition of pitting bandit-heroes against impossible odds, and the story of rebels fighting an evil empire should have also fit easily into contemporary socialist revolutionary narratives – I mean, Luke is literally a peasant before joining the rebellion. So the changes are mostly stylistic. This comic was put together just a few years after the death of Mao, and while things were opening up a little by 1980, publishers in sci-fi and fantasy had to justify their world as being useful in a communist society, meaning it needed lessons and very clear real world references. You see this in the hyper-realistic art style, and choices like making rebel uniforms look like soviet cosmonaut suits.

Luke “Gangarun” Skywalker on his way to destroy the Death Star.

There’s also a lot of bizarre real-world references, like Obi-Wan’s love for J&B whiskey, a microwave oven in the Lars Homestead, and a star map with KENNEDY SPACE CENTER scrawled across it.

Kenobi is an old drunk and Vader is keeping an eye on those uppity punks at NASA.

The focus on the real also means you need to do away with The Force. And indeed, there’s no mention of it in whatsoever in this comic. When Vader chokes a guy, he does so using his hands instead of that cool force grip. When Luke is flying down the trench, he thinks about his murdered friends and family instead of being visited by the force ghost of Obi-wan Kenobi. Hear that, Rian Johnson? Luke doesn’t believe in the force. Guess the Chinese were 35 years ahead of you.

This reminded me that you can tell the story of Star Wars pretty easily without any of the space magic, though I think you end up losing a lot of flavour. Fortunately there’s a whole other palette to be explored in this Chinese adaption. And by whole other palette, I mean one simple flavour – the beguiling zest of ape man Chewbacca.

Some frames like this are lifted directly from the film, leading me to believe that they had a few reference pieces to work off.

Somewhat strangely, Chewbacca is referred to as an ape man rather than as an alien in the text. This is inconsequential at first, but things go off the rails pretty quickly when some of the artists appear to go off this description instead of any visual representations, resulting in Chewie progressively looking more and more simian as the adventure progresses.

When Chewie first began to mutate, thought maybe the artists just didn’t know how to draw expressions on him very well. But there is clearly something else at play, because by the time our heroes are captured on the Death Star, Chewbacca is just a happy-go-lucky chimp:

Now that’s how you subvert expectations.





The art is inconsistent, the characters are bizarre representations, and the story is homogenized to fit the sensibilities of early 80s Chinese communist bureaucrats. There is only one illustrator credited, but there were clearly several artists with different levels of familiarity working on this piece, and for some reason someone felt no one would notice if they just stuck it all together.

It’s also a stolen property. But with all that said, can we really call this weird, enchanting little comic a piece of shit?

Of course we can; it’s still Star Wars afterall.

Admiral Fartmore, 2020