My personal Star Wars journey

It’s just over a week before Christmas as I write this. I’m 54 years old, which means I was born in 1970 and I was, of course, the perfect age for Star Wars when it was released in 1977. I had enjoyed reruns of Star Trek and Space:1999, along with old poorly dubbed Godzilla movies and the like, but Star Wars was like a bolt of lightning to my brain. It was unlike anything else I had ever experienced.

I had — and still have! — the movie’s novelization, which is credited to George Lucas on the cover but was actually written by Alan Dean Foster, who produced the novelizations of many science-fiction movies back then. I fell into the habit of rereading that book around Christmas every year, especially on Christmas Eve, probably because I was always hoping for Star Wars toys under the tree the next morning. Santa never disappointed me in that regard.

Like many fellow Gen Xers, though, Star Wars faded a bit to the back of my mind after Return of the Jedi was released in 1983 and it was obvious more movies weren’t coming any time soon. I also confess that as I entered my teen years, the movies became kids’ stuff in my mind, and I felt I was too grown-up for such things.

In college, however, I rediscovered comic books, thanks to a Rolling Stone article about Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I realized comic books weren’t kids’ stuff anymore, once I got ahold of and read those graphic novels (yes, they never really were, but please bear with my 80s teenage brain), and I began reading X-Men, Batman, and other assorted titles.

And then one day, in the fall of 1991, I saw it in Previews, the monthly catalog of upcoming comic books issued by distributor Diamond: a new Star Wars comic book series! Marvel had allowed the license to lapse, and Dark Horse had wisely scooped it up — that upstart publisher was becoming known at the time for putting out comic books based on Alien, Predator, and other known properties. (Yes, they published Aliens vs. Predator as a comic book many years before the movie was released.)

A new lightning bolt to my brain

Star Wars: Dark Empire was a new lightning bolt to my brain. Created by writer Tom Veitch and artist Cam Kennedy, it picked up after Return of the Jedi with new adventures of our favorite heroes. Where Al Williamson had epitomized the pure essence of Star Wars in the comic books he drew, Cam Kennedy’s highly stylized vision of that galaxy far, far away became a favorite of mine too.

Around that same time I also discovered Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy of novels, which covered the same time period. Star Wars was back! I avidly followed the events of the new novels and comics through my graduation from Rutgers University in New Jersey and to my relocation in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In California, I briefly worked for a guy who owned a few comic book shops in San Jose. I’ll just say he was a horribly misanthropic version of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and leave it at that, but I’m bringing him up because he had tons of old Kenner Star Wars action figures he had accumulated over the years and pulled out of storage for sale in his stores when it was clear that the franchise was popular again.

Star Wars strikes back

As the 90s continued, I saw the release of new Star Wars toys by Hasbro, which was a novel trend at the time because the thinking was, “Who’s going to buy toys from a movie series that was in theaters over a decade ago?” Well, it turns out that plenty of Gen Xers like myself were doing that, although I didn’t get interested in the toys until much later, preferring to stick with Star Wars novels and comic books at the time.

In April 1996, I had the chance to watch Steve Sansweet give a presentation at Wonder Con where he revealed footage from the Star Wars Special Edition due to hit theaters the following year. I recounted that story in the blog post I wrote about him. As it turned out, we ended up getting Special Editions of all three original trilogy movies, along with the Shadows of the Empire multimedia event that served as a prelude to Return of the Jedi.

And then we had the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, and it was clear that Star Wars was back in a major way, probably for good. I followed the prequels and kept reading the novels and comic books until my interest in both of them began to wane (I needed to expand my reading diet, to be honest), and Star Wars entered a bit of a lull again, although my daughter was all-in with the Clone Wars animated series on Cartoon Network.

I’ll confess I didn’t really get into that show until much later, since my feelings toward the prequels were tepid, but when Disney bought Lucasfilm and the new sequel trilogy was announced, I was all-in once again. Disney’s Star Wars movies and TV shows have been a mixed bag for me, but I still love to visit that galaxy far, far away, even if the story being told is so-so, and you will never find me among those complaining that Disney is “woke.” (If you feel the same way, I recommend the “Star Wars – For Fans Who Aren’t Dicks About It” group on Facebook, which is a lovely non-toxic way to enjoy the franchise and even disagree with others while being civil human beings.)

Enter Colin Cantwell

Somewhere around that time period, Sierra Dall pulled Colin Cantwell out of seclusion and introduced him to a fandom that he didn’t know he had. This blog will get into more detail about Colin’s life with Star Wars and beyond in the coming months and years, but let’s just say for now that if it hadn’t been for Sierra, he would have, sadly, died in seclusion when he passed in 2022.

I don’t recall exactly when and how I stumbled across Colin’s Instagram account and Facebook Page, but I happened to work at Facebook at the time, doing small business marketing. I had started a program where I was bringing a different small business in each month to talk to our marketing team, so everyone could get the point-of-view of the customer, and, obviously, what Sierra and Colin were doing as they visited comic book shops and conventions certainly fit that mold.

However, Sierra wasn’t running Colin’s social media at the time, so while I was figuring out when and how to bring in the guy who was doing that for them (he’s no longer associated with anything Colin-related), I realized that they would be visiting a comic book shop near Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Why not have them make a stop at our offices too?

This was in 2019, that pre-pandemic era when everything at Facebook (later to be renamed Meta) was “up and to the right,” as they liked to say: revenue, profits, daily active users, etc. The company was rapidly growing, and at the time, it occupied five campuses in Menlo Park, with an inter-campus shuttle system, three gyms, a lot of free places to eat, and more. It was a fun place to work, and there wasn’t a lot of bureaucracy at the time, so I was able to use the Partner Center perched on the top floor of the building I worked in to host Sierra and Colin for the event.

Colin Cantwell and Sierra Dall at Facebook

I had a friend create a poster to promote the event, and I learned how to use the Risograph printer in Facebook’s print shop (they have a woodworking shop too) to run off posters. I was also hosting a comic book artist named Walden Wong for a Q&A with our marketing team and a sales event around the same time, so my friend did that poster too. (Walden was mobbed that day. He does tons of conventions and says it’s still the busiest two hours he’s ever had.)

I had to give Facilities at least two weeks notice to get posters hung for the event with Colin, but I had run out of time, so I ended up hanging the posters around the five campuses myself. I still have a couple of them, as well as the ones made for Walden’s event.

That day — May 30, 2019, from 10 am to noon — Sierra and Colin set up shop in Facebook’s Partner Center and were greeted by a steady stream of employees who wanted to meet someone who had played such a seminal role in the development of Star Wars and buy autographed prints of his work. I remember Sierra saying she wanted to stay an extra half-hour because business was so good, which was fine by me.

Afterward, I had lunch with Sierra and Colin, and then I helped them on their way to their next destination. Sierra and I kept in touch after that, and I attended Colin’s memorial service in 2022 via Zoom. When Sierra’s need to have someone take over Colin’s website and social media accounts coincided with a post-layoff time period for me earlier this year, it seemed like the stars had aligned. I jumped onboard and this website was the result of my work.

Coming full circle with Star Wars

Now here I am at my desk, a little over a week before Christmas, and Sierra and I are preparing to do our first online event in what we plan on becoming a monthly series of podcasts. It will just be the two of us for the first installment, but the replay will be available online afterward, and we’ll have guests to chat with in the future.

Our plan is to talk about not just Colin’s Star Wars work but also his time at NASA and his part in the 1969 moon landing, his involvement in the movies WarGames, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, his work at Hewlett-Packard, where he helped the company bring more than 5,000 colors to its computer displays, and much more. Colin’s life’s work actually revolved around quantum physics, so I’m sure we’ll touch on that too along the way. We hope you’ll join us.

As for me, well, I think seven-year-old me in 1977 would be flabbergasted by what 54-year-old me ended up working on just a week before Christmas in the year 2024. Happy holidays to my readers around the world!