Return Of The Jedi in Iconoscope, by Wayne Dorrington
Star Wars fans have had a lot to talk about over the last few months, some of it good and some of it bad. We’ve seen the proper release of the crowd sourced Star Wars Uncut and the takedown of Star Wars Begins, more additions to the ever expanding toy ranges, a new Super Bowl ad that polarized the GeekDads, and of course the 3D re-release of The Phantom Menace and all the hulabaloo that came along with it.
If you’ve had to endure Jar Jar’s antics over the weekend, then please allow me to offer you a small unicorn chaser to help banish the CGI from your mind and take you back to a time when Star Wars was still fun.
EP VI, PT. 1
Wayne Dorrington is a UK based illustrator and designer who has just released the final part of his retelling of the original trilogy using only iconography. He started with Star Wars back in February last year and quickly followed it up with Empire in April. 10 months later he’s back with the epic, five-part Return of the Jedi, the first part of which is on the right. Wayne says over on his blog:
This was a biggie. The first Iconoscope was a single page of 32 lines of icons – but then the story was actually quite simple, when you look at it. For Episode V, it took much longer to design and lay out, running double the length of the original…
And then I started on Episode VI. Just thinking of it from memory, I recalled it to be a fairly straightforward story… But then I watched it again… and it went on… and on… and on…
Each character has multiple costume changes. The plot runs into 3 separate lines and constantly jumps between them. Vehicles, scenery, sub characters…
It soon was clear that this was going to take a while… and here we are nearly a year on, and it’s finally finished.
As with the previous two episodes, there are some great touches in the illustrations, the rendition of Jabba for one. Wayne has clearly has a lot of fun drawing some of them. The Endor battle is ace, as are the 8-bit video game interludes, but it’s seeing the classic lines of dialogue that you know by heart that make you chuckle the most – Admiral Ackbar’s famous line above is a good example and look out for Han’s idea too. I also like the way he represents an evil laugh.
Head over to Wayne’s blog, fittingly called “I should really get out more” to check out all five parts and don’t worry, there’s not a mention of “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” in the whole thing.
