He saved the Star Wars galaxy as Luke Skywalker, but in 1983, actor Mark Hamill also may have saved the franchise by preventing Marvel Comics from spoiling Return of the Jedi months before its official release.
When the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, the Marvel Comics adaptation ran monthly in conjunction. The series then continued the story of Luke Skywalker and company once that adaptation ran its course, and Marvel continued to publish adaptations of the movies as they came out. The Empire Strikes Back was adapted in issues #39-44 of the regular series, while Return of the Jedi was adapted in its own self-titled miniseries. Before that came out, however, the miniseries adaptation of ROTJ was released in a single issue, in Marvel Comics Super Special #27, released in May 1983.
Mark Hamill Prevented Return of the Jedi From Being Spoiled
The Return of the Jedi adaptation almost came out earlier and would have spoiled the movie in advance, if not for the timely intervention of Luke Skywalker himself. According to Comic Buyer’s Guide #497, Hamill saw issues of the adaptation out in the wild before the movie was released. The incident was recounted in a 2005 piece by John Jackson Miller about Marvel’s Star Wars series on the old Comic Buyer’s Guide website:
“As reported in Comics Buyer’s Guide #497 (May 27, 1983), comics fan Mark Hamill discovered copies on sale a month prior to the release of the film and alerted Lucasfilm. According to Carol Kalish, Marvel’s direct-sales manager, Marvel representatives swung into action to get the magazine off the stands upon learning of the error.”
Written by Archie Goodwin with art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzón, Marvel’s Return of the Jedi is the shortest of all three adaptations of the films in the Original Trilogy. The previous two movies had six issues to tell their respective adaptations, while ROTJ was cut back to sixty-four pages, or what amounted to four comic book issues. Even so, it still covers the major beats of the story, so it’s fortuitous that Mark Hamill is a real-life comics fan; otherwise he may not have seen the comic while browsing the stands, and the end of Return of the Jedi may have been spoiled in advance. Of course, as Miller notes in his piece, many of the twists and turns wound up getting leaked to the press, saying, “Other security lapses unrelated to the comics market resulted in the premature revelation of many of the film’s secrets.”
Fortunately for Star Wars fans of the day fearing spoilers, Mark Hamill prevented at least some leaks ahead of Return of the Jedi’s release by catching the Marvel Comics adaptation in time. Sometimes it pays off to be a comics fan.
