Race into adventure with Kane Starkiller and his sons Annikin and Deak! Whoever they are!
In 1999 Dark Horse Comics published an intriguing experiment called Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Origin — a comic-book adaptation of Joss Whedon’s original script for the movie, hewing more closely to what he envisioned in his head before the director and producer meddled and warped everything. Although Dark Horse’s version didn’t contain nearly enough Paul Reubens, few Buffy fans would choose the movie over The Origin. It was a rare opportunity to see a writer’s lost draft technically restored and given life anew.
In that same vein, Dark Horse now brings us The Star Wars, an eight-issue miniseries promising to adapt George Lucas’ 1974 rough-draft screenplay that would later be rethought, rewritten, rearranged, and eventually filmed as merely Star Wars. Without the “The”. Because it looked cleaner.
I can always tell when the Greatest Spectacle in Entertainment News is revving its engines and approaching the starting line — the Facebook statuses for all my West Coast online cohorts begin chiming their location and awe in unison, letting those of us off in the distance know It Has Begun.
I would be remiss in my comics fandom if I didn’t take a moment to plug the heck out of the twelfth annual 
As with most big-budget sci-fi films nowadays, many viewers will spend half the running time of the new Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion mentally tallying how many refurbished components they recognize from other sci-fi flicks. That doesn’t automatically make the film bad in my book, but it can be a pervasive distraction that turns my viewing experience into one long Highlights for Children puzzle. (Score one point for every borrowed element you spot! If you spot ten or more, you’re a Certified Movie Maven!) Oblivion is the second feature film from Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron: Legacy, which was a visual wonderland and a surprisingly classy act considering it was a Disney sequel to a film I’ve disliked since I was ten. 
2012 was my worst year for comic book enjoyment in the last fifteen years. I’ve collected them for thirty-four years, ever since the well-stocked spinner racks at Marsh Supermarket caught my eye at age six and opened new worlds of imagination and heroism. For the majority of my life they’ve been my primary hobby among all my hobbies. Once upon a time, friends could count on me to spout the occasional essay about a particular series, event, historical recollection, or rage-filled response to an aesthetic offense. When I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover last April, I thought the topic of comic books would inspire a lot more posts than they have so far.
