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Tuesday 18 December 2012

Attila Fazekas And The Legal Bootleg Star Wars!


Taken a while but as CBO is very interested in comics from Europe the following email from János Verebics was quite interesting -with plenty of images!
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“Maybe some news you will be interested in?

“As I informed you in previous mails, Attila Fazekas, one of the great masters of the Hungarian Golden Age of Comics is still alive (thanks God), and is very active. He completed an epic story on the early years of our greatest national hero, Janos Hunyadi (Brightness of the Morning Star) and…
The Return Of The Jedi!.


Above and Below: Fazekas at work









In 1982 – without the permission of Lucasfilm – he made a very good adaption of Star Wars, which was sold over 600,000 copies (yeah, no mistake: 600, 000) in Hungary. And two years later he produced an adaption of The Empire Strikes Back.

After 1990 the original US comics were published in my country too, but the Hungarian Star Wars fans have never given up dreaming about having a Fazekas-Return Of The Jedi. Now the dream comes true: Lucasfilm has kindly given permission to the Hungarian Star Wars Fan Club to publish Return Of The Jedi but limited to no more then 500 copies and for FREE (i.e. no licence fees were requested).

The first part was published last month and we love it…

This edition was fortunately published with an official permission, and the circulation is really under control (no more, than 500, really). Fazekas is working now on the second book, which will be published next year. I’ll enclose some photographs I took yesterday at Attila’s home. Please do not hesitate to use them as illustrations.
The whole thing was, of course, not a business venture. On the Star Wars conventions the booklets are sold for 4,25 euros. But it’s a huge victory to the Hungarian SW Club and the comics art, which proved it’s good quality, again.

Below: Nice to see another artist’s drawing space!

Above:a spread of Star Wars artwork by Fazekas. And below, as Janos writes:
“Fazekas made a small joke on the first page of the second part: he placed himself into the story (he put his own face one of the characters).”

0257, 0256 and 0259 are pics taken (by hand) of the “original” Hungarian Star Wars from the 80s (below).

















I think this shows that, far from being some comic backwater that had no American comics, Hungarian creators were quite prolific and as good as any of their “Western” counterparts.
There is some lovely work here and my thanks to Janos for letting me know about this -I just hope Fazekas makes some money out of this!



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