Lefty Limbo

Sometime last year, my parents presented to me an old, weathered cardboard box which had been in storage for over 30 years. On it, they wrote in black marker: G.N. SCHOOL WORKS 1977+.

Sure enough, held inside was indeed a well-preserved time capsule of my wonder years; a collection of doodles, random graded school assignments and even some old magazine clippings and coloring books from about 1977-79. I’m slowly curating it for the choicest specimens and I’ll be sure to share them with you all.

By far, though, the most landmark discovery of this box of memoirs was the multitude of Star Wars drawings; a true testament of my total infatuation over the movie release in ’77. In an earlier post, I’d shared a Star Wars illo which I found in one of my old photo albums. Hoo boy, that was just the tip of the Hoth Iceberg, as you’ll soon find out.

Anyways, I’ve made it my duty to scan these Star Wars sightings and post them to the Flickr group, Growing Up Star Wars: 1977-1985 (a must-see and must-join for all ’70s and ’80s kids). But for the lucky thousands of Lefty Limbo fans, here you’ll get to see the pictures and read my lengthy commentaries. You may now commence to jump up and down in unbridled excitement.

You were all privy to Lord Vader, who graced the intro of this article. Now let’s take a look at R2D2, who resided on the back side of this delicate, aged canvas…

A closer look at the upper right corner reveals that R2D2 is not alone, but rather holding up an excursion to the Millenium Falcon parked in the background, perhaps to evade Vader on the other side of the paper. Or to hunt him. Either way, here you see Han Solo and co-pilot Chewbacca. Han Solo yells, “Come on, Artoo!” while Chewbacca beckons with his own wookie response—GRUNK.

“Grunk?” I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw that. What strikes me also is the ghostly entity to the right of Han Solo…I’m not sure who that’s supposed to be but I must’ve changed my mind and erased him/her.

Looking at this closeup, I also noticed how I was starting to get a slight grasp of perspective. I rendered some dimension in the frame of the “garage” in which the Millenium Falcon sits, yet I couldn’t quite get the same effect on the ramp, hmm?

The late ’70s were definitely formative years for my illustrative ventures. My mom was a librarian at UCLA at the time and often came home with reams of discarded computer paper which I could draw on. The large format presented a galaxy of possibilities, mainly for me to fulfill my fantasies of epic X-Wing vs. TIE fighter battles, as seen above.

As you’ll begin to notice, as I share more of these illos with you, I typically drew X-Wings blowing TIE fighters out of the sky. In Star Wars, TIE fighters had this exciting way of meeting their doom—in furious explosions which sent their panels splintering off into space, end over end like playing cards flung across a room. I truly relished in recapturing this aspect in my battle scenes. But in this one, I even included a somewhat tragic detail of the circular cockpit glass flying off. Poor TIE pilot. Dood, hold your breath, maybe you’ll make it. Yeah right.

A closer view to the area just left of the TIE fighters reveals yet another threat from another galaxy…Cylon Raiders from the original Battlestar Galactica series of 1978! That was another series I was obsessed with. I owned several Battlestar Galactica toys including the Cylon Raiders, and here I depict how the wings opened up to reveal their missile-launching capabilities.

I’m not sure what those dark masses are, gathered above the center portions of the Raiders. Kinda looks like a group of people, huh? Were these sporty convertible Raiders cruising with the top down?

Sigh. So the fun has just begun. Stay tuned for more scanned Star Wars goodness. Enjoy =)

Tags: Flashbacks

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2010 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Flashbacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.