Original Artwork from Dark Horse Jabba the Hutt Comics

I posted about the Dark Horse Jabba the Hutt one-off comics way back in 2009. They told stories about Jabba’s past as a crime lord, before the events of the Star Wars movies. They’re one of the few stories that have Jabba as the star, and while I’m not sure whether they would be considered canon now, I think they do a pretty good job of showing how cunning and ruthless Jabba might have been. I was very happy to be able to get some of the original artwork for these comics.

I got these from Monty Sheldon, who was the inker for the comics (and who is still selling some of the other pages on eBay if you’re interested). He didn’t have all of the pages, since some were apparently given to the penciller Art Wetherell, but even so it was difficult to choose. In the end I chose two pages from “The Gaar Suppoon Hit” because that’s probably my favorite of the comics, and these two pages are sequential. They tell a little story that you can probably understand even without reading the rest of the comic.

The third page below is from “Betrayal” and I got it because it showed Jabba and Bib Fortuna in his palace, with Jabba on his throne.

Below is a comparison of one of the pages of original artwork and how it appeared in the comics after being colored by computer. (I also have a colorist page for one of these comics that I’ve posted about before.)

These are on illustration boards that are roughly 19″ by 12″, which is why I had to take photos of them instead of scanning — they’re just too big for the scanner. One thing that I found very cool were the little imperfections, like where whiteout was used to correct something, or where the pencil lines had been left behind. On the two pages from “The Gaar Suppoon Hit” the speech bubbles have been pasted on separately on top of the art. Of course none of this shows up in the finished comic.

Since the comics came out in 1995 and early 1996, they weren’t influenced by George Lucas’s “improved” CGI version of Jabba that started with the “Special Edition” of “A New Hope” and that’s fantastic for me, since the Return of the Jedi design is what I vastly prefer. I think these are great just as pieces of art, but the connection to the comics makes them even more special. I plan to frame these and display them, hopefully with the two sequential pages side by side.