It's Knock-Off Vaders Week!
Darth Vader is -- for better or worse -- the standard by which all other Star Wars villains (and many non-Star Wars villains) are measured. Is the villain a caped, pious, cyborg dad on the way to redemption? If not, why not?
The two greatest leaps of faith in Star Wars storytelling were The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens, not least because they had to come up with a villain to stand in Vader’s intimidating shadow and still -- somehow -- be seen. Ian McCaig said, on designing Maul,
“stupidly I tried to out-helmet Vader, only to discover (duh) there’s no beating Ralph McQuarrie’s original design. Finally ... I took the helmet off and started to explore the face underneath.”
What McCaig did behind the scenes, Kylo Ren does in-universe -- his is the deliberate story of a self-aware knock-off Vader. As Oscar Wilde said, stepping out of the movie theater in 2015,
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
But while Kylo struggles with his mediocrity, most other knock-off Vaders relish in theirs. This week, I’ll find seven examples of KOV’s trying their darnedest (or not) to walk the walk, wheeze the wheeze, and out-helmet the helmet of this cinematic icon.
One of the earliest KOV I know of is also one of the purest forms of knock-off -- the girl version! The Ms. Male Character pictured above is Sharlee, a.k.a. Pink Vader (she’s real, gamers!). She is an invention of the great Russ Manning, who single-handedly wrote and drew daily comics for newspapers back when all that existed of Star Wars was the first movie. Lacking Empire and Jedi, Manning could not have known the whole scope of Vader’s arc -- but he managed to anticipate Vader’s unmasking with this cheerful, girl-power variant.
I honestly hesitated to feature Sharlee first, because, really, you can’t get any better than this. You have to bow down to the sheer audacity of enclosing Vader’s skull-like face in a heart (and adding 2 head-guns, 2 shoulder-guns, and 2 hip-guns, not pictured). Her Sundays-only story, “The Constancia Affair,” also introduces two more excellent ladies: Gamine, a telepathic little weirdo, and Gyla, the love of my life.
Sharlee’s design also foresaw the eyes of Betazoids, the hairdo of Rose Tico, and even the white-haired, traditionalist warrior women of KotOR II’s Echani:
Eat your heart out, Mandalorians! -- And get it, Han!
Sharlee is Queen of the Knock-Off Vaders; check in the rest of this week for the less sincere flattery of far less sexy imitators!
Star Wars Newspaper Comic Strip: “The Constancia Affair.” May 13th and June 10th, 1979. Writer and Illustrator: Russ Manning. Colorist: Chris Chalenor (thank you for the original, authentic Pink Vader!).
