May 2007 will mark thirty years since the original theatrical release of Star Wars. John Booth, who at age six converted his thumbs and index fingers from cowboy shooters to Han Solo-inspired blasters, is raking together his memories of the saga in a series of essays for Field's Edge.The series begins here.

   For either my eighth birthday or Christmas 1978, I don’t remember which, my Aunt Carol gave me three books, wrapped together in plastic. Their spines read “Star Wars” and “The Marvel Comics Illustrated version of Star Wars” and some weird-sounding title I’d never heard of that made me think, “What does she think I am, a novelist?” because I thought “novelist” mean someone who read a lot of books with small print and no pictures. 
   That third book was “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” by Alan Dean Foster, and when I actually took off the shrink-wrap and realized that I was holding a previously-untold Star Wars story, I was just bowled over. I still re-read it every few years and find that my mind creates the same mental pictures as when I was little. (“Splinter” was adapted into a comic book in the 1990s, and I never read it, in part because the illustrations clashed so violently with my those in my own imagination that I decided after seeing just a page or two that I’d rather keep my eight-year-old interpretation intact.) 
   A couple things in “Splinter” have always stood out in my head: The gross-out scenes, like the one where a prisoner has an eye put out by an Imperial officer, or the description of a post-fight combatant as he “chucked the double handful” of an enemy’s remains on the ground, where it lay “moist and glistening;” Luke, pinned face-down a pond floor in a hand-to-hand battle as he feels “the clean grains [of sand] pressing into his nostrils.” 
   When the Return of the Jedi Sketchbook came out about five or six years later, I was surprised to see references to “Yuzzum,” described as creatures with little round bodies and long, spindly legs, and I thought it was odd because there were Yuzzem (with an ‘e’) in “Splinter,” but these were serious bad-ass guys – one of them turns an Imperial into that glistening double-handful of slop – that I always pictured as a cross between a Wookiee and an orangutan. 
   I was always confused, though, by a bit near the end of the book. Luke and Vader have just been Force-beating the snot out of each other: Vader’s lost an arm and is staggering around, Luke’s in an exhausted heap on the ground. Then comes this line: “I’m sorry,” he murmured, turning his head to where the Princess lay crumpled on the temple floor. “I’m sorry, Leia. I loved you.” Problem is, the previous paragraphs are so packed with action and description going back and forth between farm boy and Sith Lord that it’s not immediately clear who “he” is. For years, I assigned the line to Vader. (This was way before anybody knew the whole brother-sister-dad thing was going on.) It was only when I re-read the book in my late 20s that I realized it could have been – and in fact, probably was meant to be – Luke’s line. I could go look it up in that comic version, I suppose, but I like keeping the memory of the mystery. 
   Oh, and one last thing: On the cover, Luke’s hair is too long, and you can’t see his face, so he looks like a girl. This also confused me when I was little. 
   “Splinter” was a relatively easy read for me, even at age eight. There were words I didn’t know – “hirsute,” for instance, and “troglodytes” – but it was still Star Wars, so I just kept on plowing through the pages. 
   The Star Wars novelization struck me as much tougher, probably because the opening of chapter one – “It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space – but it was not a sun.”  – immediately put me off my guard. What the hell? Where’s the gigantic Star Destroyer? Where’s the laser barrage and the explosions? How am I supposed to know what’s going on without those yellow-lettered paragraphs floating past? And what’s “lambent topaz” mean anyway? 
   I was also blasted by the prologue, which ended with the designation, “From the First Saga, Journal of the Whills.” Huh? What’s this “first saga” thing? Decades later, when I was in college, I even searched for “Journal of the Whills” in the Bowling Green State University library’s computer system, since this was before the Internet as we know it. Part of me is still a little tweaked that 30 years and a prequel trilogy and a cargo hold of Star Wars spinoffs later, there’s no more mention of the Whills, but then again, since Episodes I-III gave us midichlorians, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with an unanswered question or two. 
   Another thing that stuck with me from the Star Wars novel is the Jabba the Hutt scene in Docking Bay 94, not because I remember being stunned by this bit that wasn’t in the movie, but because I used to flip through the glossy section of film photos that were in the middle of the book. I eventually tore those pages out - presumably so I could look at them without the incredible hassle of actually opening the book – and on the right page right after the resulting gap was Han’s concluding line in the Jabba scene: “I’ll pay you because … it’s my pleasure.” 
   The third and slimmest volume in my paperback trilogy collected the first six issues of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars printed in black and white. I saw this version before I saw the actual comics themselves and I was stunned when, at my friend Trevor’s birthday party, I saw the explosion of colors – particularly in the two-thirds-page illustration of the Falcon’s jump to hyperspace – in the giant-sized color edition he’d gotten. 
   The comic books did make it into our house eventually, because I think dad bought a bagged set of them, maybe in a couple three-packs. The taffy-pulled interpretation of Ben Kenobi’s death by lightsaber kind of weirded me out, like the one I had in a Spider-Man Read-Along-Record book where the villain is transforming from a human to a lizard and there’s a portrait where he’s got a human face, but he’s green and yellow. 
   Inspired by the Marvel Star Wars, one day I was coaching my friend Rick in our garage during what was supposed to be a re-creation of the Vader-Kenobi duel. We were wielding these miniature pool cues from a toy pool table, and I was trying to get him to play out the dialogue, only somehow he just wasn’t getting the nuances right, so his delivery of Vader’s “Your powers are weak, old man.” was a lot closer to, say, Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard – all hyperactivity and loud threat - than it was to James Earl Jones’ slow and deadly onscreen taunts. 
   At school, I remember spending a rainy first-grade recess reading the Star Wars comics with a couple other kids. Along the back wall of our classroom was a set of orange and yellow cupboards, two rows high. The lower left corner space, though, was just an open cubbyhole area, and two of my friends and I sat in there reading Star Wars. (That cubby is also where I learned the trick of breaking crayons with my middle three fingers and a slap on the leg. Went through a box of 64 in one sitting.) 
   My daughter attended that same elementary school and had first grade in that same classroom. The cupboards are still there, including the one with different hinges on its door because I broke the original set by swinging on it. The cubby was still there, too: It had one of those small two-drawer filing cabinets in it, which filled the entire space. I couldn’t have squeezed myself in there these days, much less two pals and a set of comic books. 
   I was never a comics kid except for Star Wars, and even that didn’t last very long. I had the next six issues, I think, that continued the heroes’ stories beyond the original movie, but really wasn’t in for the long haul. 
   I do remember an issue starring Han and Chewbacca and a rabbit-alien and a guy named Don Wan Kihotay (imagine my astonishment in high school at realizing this had been a literary reference). And there were others with a red-bearded space pirate and a girl pirate named Jolli, who lives in my brain in a flashback sequence showing her as a little girl watching her father leave his family behind, and then in her death scene, when Han plants a kiss on her cold lips. 
   I took these comics on a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, I think, and read them in the back seat of the car during the drive down. I was reading that bit about Jolli when my aunt – the same one who’d given me the paperbacks – asked my if I ever read any “regular” comics. Like, you know, “Archie.” (It might seem odd, but I did have a couple of those little volumes of Archie and Jughead, but Star Wars had its hooks in me pretty damn deep by this point and was first choice from here on out.) 
   
   There was other, lighter Star Wars reading, too: The Activity Books (I had the Chewbacca edition, and either the Luke or Vader one, too) with their pencil-and-paper brainteasers and suggestions for games like “Rebellion,” which requires a regular deck of Earth-made playing cards and bears a striking resemblance to “War.” 
   My favorite kids’ book, though, was “Star Wars: The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot.” Lots of pictures, simple plot, spaceships and droids gone bonkers and pesky Jawas galore. But it was the pictures that sold this one: These weren’t bland renditions or just airbrushed versions inspired by movie stills. These were squiggly and cartoony caricatures that are still just a ton of fun. 
   One of the neatest things I’ve been able to do as a writer was track down the illustrator of that book, Mark Corcoran, with the notion of writing a feature on the book’s 25th anniversary back in 2004. I wrote him a letter, we had a few phone chats, and I turned it into an article for TheForce.net.
   I even bought one of the original “Rebellious Robot” illustrations for the book from Mark. It’s one of my favorite pieces of Star Wars, kept a shelf or two above the one where you’ll find the paperback copy I had as a kid.
   Paper’s not as durable as action figure plastic, but I have almost all of my Star Wars books from those days, my name fat-penciled inside their front covers, worn soft and faded, spines glazed with yellow, brittle tape, pages hardly held in place. I could find better copies on eBay or through other collectors, or buy reprints from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but somehow, that would change the stories I remember.    

   Here are the links to the rest of Remembering Star Wars:

Part I: Summer, 1977
Part II: The Droids We Were Looking For
Part III: Perfect Hibernation
Part V: Collect All 21!
Part VI: A Certain Point of View
Part VII: A Pack-A-Day Habit
Part VIII: Size Matters Not

Part IX: Along A Different Path

Part X: There is Another

Part XI: Bounty Hunting