On Any Other Planet, They'd Be the Bad Guys

Back when I was but a wee lad of ten or eleven, Marvel adapted that Star Wars movie into a six-issue comic book series and then blew my little mind by continuing the series on past the adaptation. Lord have mercy, I've never been as excited as I was when I saw the cover to Star Wars #7 promising a brand new story about my favorite characters, Han and Chewie.

Looking back at it with adult eyes, it's a lame Seven Samurai rip-off with some pretty uninspired characters. A Luke Skywalker-esque boy from a crappy backwater planet hires a bunch of rogues and scoundrels to protect his village from a band of marauders. Han and Chewie take the job as do other such classic characters as the delusional old man named Don-Wan Kihotay who thinks he's a Jedi. Ugh.

There were a couple of characters from that story that stood out though. One was the humanoid porcupine named Hedji who could throw his quills. Another was my favorite: the giant, green, carnivorous bunny named Jaxxon, who looked like a gamma irradiated Bugs Bunny and talked like, well, like Han Solo. Which was a little redundant, but still kinda cool because Solo was cool and, hey, it was a giant rabbit. And he had a hot, human girlfriend.

Okay, it's still kinda dumb, but he had it all goin' on over freakin' Don-Wan.

Anyway, this trip down Memory Lane is precipitated by the announcement this week that TheForce.net is sponsoring a webstrip starring my favorite Marvel Star Wars character. Appropriately, it's a rip-off of another movie. Not Kurosawa, but Soderbergh. Jaxxon's 11 has Jaxxon just getting out of the clink and trying to recruit Solo (or as Jaxxon like to call him, Organa-Solo) and Chewie for a caper to take down Bib Fortuna. Promising the addition of Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, and Jaxxon's girlfriend Amaiza to the cast, Jaxxon's 11 is hilarious. And for the continuity-minded individual, it even explains how come there are three Jabba's: the fat slug, the furry-vested human in the deleted scene from Star Wars, and the seal-faced humanoid from Marvel's adaptation.

These days, it seems that finding an old Star Wars fan with a sense of humor about the series is hard to do. There's just so much animosity towards George Lucas for Raping Our Childhoods that many "fans" can't laugh and enjoy any more. But if that's not you; if you can still get tickled by a giant green rabbit with a blaster pistol, check out Jaxxon's 11. It's good stuff.