Every second we’re alive we’re making history

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A Brief History of British Comics
23: Star Wars Weekly

• Publisher – Marvel UK
• Feb 1978 – June 1986
• 155 issues

Star Wars blooms in the margins, between the lines. I first saw the film standing on a chair in my cousin’s house, petrified of the Sand People and Jawas. I watched a pirate copy of Return of the Jedi during the VHS copyright hinterlands of the early 80s. I can’t remember if I heard about the AT-AT sequence in The Empire Strikes Back before I saw it.

The texture of Star Wars was woven from glimpsed copies of tie-in books, and frenetic playground games with multiple Han Solos and myriad Leias. The toys were easily as important as the infrequently viewed core texts. My personal Star Wars canon heavily featured the Tie-Fighter pilot in pivotal roles.

Star Wars Weekly reprinted the Marvel comics series that initially serialised the film before spiralling off into its own wild, unsanctioned mythos. Marvel UK had done this successfully before, with the Planet of the Apes comics, and launched the comic a year after Star Wars hit cinemas in 1977.

There was work by Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, and later original strips by British creators, including the early career highlight ‘Tilotny Throws a Shape’ by the wookie-ish Alan Moore.

These comics are like someone telling you about a Star Wars dream they had; they feel illicit and bootleg. The continuity was free-wheeling and exploratory, with none of the clamped down corporate canonizing of the property now. There were Cloud Hoppers and Sky Riders. Flashbacks to Luke’s early adventures. A giant green rabbit.  It was all just as fabulously marginal and joyous as the ragtag missions being conducted in my back garden, where my cat Jezebel was as deadly-a-threat as the Sarlac Pit.

Lore is a deadly bore. Star Wars is a collective act of dreaming, by 7 year olds stretching back a long time ago.

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Happy days

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SUTURE (Paul Jon Milne, 2025)

Let’s consider the sights, sounds and smells of this appalling place, if only to work out how we can avoid washing up here.

Experienced Milnemaniacs will recognise hints of Ewins and McCarthy in faceguards that are both cool as fuck and a clear cry for help. True heads may also know these influences well enough to avoid the fool’s errand of trying to discern what colours are representative and which are expressive. Everything in Suture is inside out, exposed. 

To clutch at another old wound, perhaps what this world most looks like is the face of two Transformers melded together, a one-off expression of pain made universal, hard boundaries turned soft and pulpy. 

You'd be daft to try to separate the verbal from the visual in Suture, but it’s worth trying to hear how all those bubbles pop. Just in the opening sequence you’ve got pithy sci-fi action patter, dank poetic narration, notes to self, rundown town blues and unprompted memories coming to the surface simultaneously. That it all flows so well is a sign of Milne’s total commitment to getting into the muck of his own imagination.

As I get older I’m increasingly haunted by something a friend’s dad said about still replaying playground arguments in your eighties. There’s a terror to this, a sense that we never recover from even the mildest injury. There’s a tenderness there too though, a confirmation that it’s possible to give a fuck across the ages, no matter how dumb and wretched your world gets. This awareness animates Suture – “You could have stood up for your friend”/”That weird first kiss with too much teeth”. For all its dry humour and pointed horror, the whole thing stinks of yearning. 

I suspect the smell will still trouble me when I’m put in my grave. 

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AKA BUTTERMILK JESUS AKA DJ HALFCOURT VIOLATION AKA LI'L WORLD CUP

Don't try and tell me the World Cup isn't good - not unless you want to see me behave like an Express columnist rattling around about Christmas being cancelled - it is good, the thing itself - an sing an dich - and my sacrosanct religious holiday and time-marker*; a colourful festival and contest of self-expression and the perfect substitute for war (and that’s Paul Auster saying it nae me). Now, everything around it - the main host, the organisers, the money always the money… I agree that's bad, but honestly fascists are turning the sky black up the road from you right now, maybe multiculturalism might be curative eh. Get really fucking invested in Senegal who do have one of the eight best squads there and are presently having to litigate back their continental title or a first-timer like Uzbekistan or Jordan; is their government good, no I expect not and how is yours… I think this is largely a lesson of Persepolis, a polity has common ground with any other but not with an authority, seems obvious when you put it like that dunnit? Iran doing well to commemorate Marjane Satrapi (if only in my mind) and further bother the fascist cry baby prez would be class.

*I can always remember how I felt circumstantially around the month of a WC, notably in 2014 when I could to degrees empathise with the aghast and humiliated David Luiz following Brazil's Maracanazo II, a 1-7 shellacking in a home World Cup semifinal, but also falling in love with Roger Milla, Cameroon and largely frustratingly African football in 1990… my heating broke 2 weeks in the groups during the 2022 Qatar Winter World Cup, if that were a metaphor it'd be belaboured but no.

As for Scotland please please please just beat Haiti tonight, it’s all we have to do, God do not provide ne another damp squib - adopt the vile attitudes of the protagonists of James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover for 90 minutes if you must

come on, their gods are absolutely terrifying bastards

I WANT TO SEE KENNY MCLEAN, FROM 50 YARDS

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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Pan Macmillan, 2026)

The city makes a roaring sound that never goes away. Not just the square mile, everything inside the orbital. The best place to listen is on the central line, tunneling at speed through the old plague pits, where it keys up into a sharp, deafening howl.

The first thing you learn is pretend you can’t hear it. If the voice of London gets in through a crack, it fills you up and blows you apart. It happens to three stock sorts dug up from the layers of deep casting in the city’s signature industries: the aging gangster after one last score. A slippery spiv lost in daddy’s shadow. An upstart conman with a dazzling gift for falsehood but fucked with the wrong old cunts - no less dangerous for their lack of originality.

The ambitious webs of deception and delusion they pull about themselves are painfully mediatised and banal, too thin to keep the noise out. Locked inside the high rise at One Hyde Park they go mad like patients in a candy store, until the CCTV at MI6 on the north bank opposite shows the kid going over the balcony, somehow seeking safety in the river’s thirsty grip.

The technique here should be familiar. An extravagant death that thickens and becomes less legible the more you look at it, yet throws a penetrating accusation at its context and environment. The old town won't speak of its secrets without a sacrifice in return. 

Mapping its criminal economy from the big bang of the 80s to its surrender under global oligarchy, Keefe captures the strange feeling of disconnection that exists now between London’s streets, screens and skies. His prose forks and coils between the anonymous new towers, pointing fingers but leaving cruel subtexts unsaid, slowly losing his way and trying not to hear while the city screams its mysteries in his face.