Gyla Petro made her grand, slinky appearance in Russ Manning’s Sundays-only story “The Constancia Affair” (first three panels shown), in which she runs around the Falcon in a shimmery leotard and pearls. She doesn’t do much except get ignored by all the other characters, whether she is demanding to go out or demanding to come in. Still, the look is strong (Qi’ra who?) and the personality is even stronger.
Russ must have loved her too, because the following Sundays-only story, “The Kashyyyk Depths” (last three panels shown), goes back in time to cover her bloody meet-cute with Han and suggests that she was really working for the badguys! Han and Chewie must explore Kashyyyk to find the drugs the Wookiees need to properly celebrate Life Day (hell yeah), but while they are there they meet a team of human scientists who are being eaten by plants. The only survivor is Gyla --
But the story was abruptly stopped before we got to the spy part, because the powers that be just had to stifle Russ’ creativity. They demanded that he stop writing two ongoing stories -- one on Sundays and one for dailies -- and instead write one story on both. So Russ ended the 7-month-long dailies story “Gambler’s World” and abruptly interrupted “Kashyyyk Depths” in order to make “Tatooine Sojourn” across every day of the week.
I think Russ was unhappy with this instruction. Since some papers published the comic only on weekdays and some published it only on Sundays, it made more logical sense to write them as separate stories. Russ’ writing style also leans heavily on improvisation, meandering from one bizarre, high-energy situation to the next, abhorring any rules or restrictions. Once he was bound to one story, it meant he had to make it make sense whether one was only reading the dailies or the Sundays, and it still had to be entertaining if one read both. This led to a lot of enforced repetition, though -- I must say -- Russ handled it far more creatively than his successors, who would use fillers for the title cards, trace their own panels, and repeat dialogue word-for-word. Russ almost always wrote and drew things in a new way. As unhappy as it was for him, he was truly a master at it.
You can even, perhaps, catch a glimpse of his frustration in the words of his characters. (Most prominently in Luke, the great self-insert himself, which I’ll write about tomorrow.) Mistress Mnemos indignantly chides 3PO for neglecting to finish the story, while 3PO stubbornly plows ahead with the new one. Attributing this narrative flip to the whims of the absentminded 3PO, rather than the demands of Russ’ employers, was a sheer stroke of genius and grace. After all, 3PO is supposed to be "not very good at telling stories. Well, not at making them interesting, anyway.”
And this leaves Gyla and her unresolved subterfuge -- my personal favorite plot hole in Star Wars. I doubt Russ himself knew exactly what he wanted to do with her. As he said of his Star Wars work shortly before his tragic death at fifty-two:
“The way that I prefer to write, and this [eventually drove] the Star Wars people up the wall...is to sit down and conceptualize a story. I decide what the main conflict is, who the villain is and what he is, how it ends, how the hero solves it, who our main characters are throughout the story, and that’s it. I don’t write it out, pre-plot it, or anything of that nature. I didn’t even break it down into eight weeks or twelve weeks or anything of that nature, but would just start writing, thinking it would be fresher and more fun for me, every week, to do what was necessary for that Sunday page or that particular set of six dailies.”
“I like the way the characters act as characters. They’re more whole, they hang together as characters... I didn’t even tell stories. I told little happenings that would go on and then you could move off and tell another kind of happening.”
I really love his uncompromising attitude toward having fun. This level of creative freedom is inspiring. Unlike 3PO, Russ knew what he was doing: not telling stories, just making them interesting.
Star Wars Newspaper Comic Strip: “The Constancia Affair” and “The Kashyyyk Depths.” April 22, 29, May 27, July 15, and September 9, 1979. Writer and Illustrator: Russ Manning. Quote from Henry G. Franke III’s memorial to Russ Manning in in Star Wars: The Complete Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol 1, published in 2017.
