THE DREAMS OF WALLY LOMBEGO

Comic Book Resources has a regular feature that I always enjoy called Comic Book Legends Revealed and, in the current installment, they touch on an incident that happened very early in my career.  It involves Star Wars, the birth of my son and the value of pacifism.  (How’s that for a teaser?)  You can get the broad beats at CBR, but here’s the whole story:

It was 1980 and I was very new to comics:  I’d written a number of stories for DC—mostly for their anthologies—and a few for Gold Key, but I was just getting my foot in the door at Marvel.  I’d scripted a couple of fill-ins for editor-in-chief Jim Shooter—an Iron Man story, a Doctor Strange—but nothing had made it to print yet.  One day I got a call from editor Louise Jones (she’s Louise Simonson now) asking me if I wanted to write an issue of Marvel’s Star Wars monthly.  I, of course, immediately said yes because a) it was Marvel Comics, the house that Stan and Jack built and b) I couldn't afford to turn down the work.  I didn’t bother to mention to Louise that I had zero interest in Star Wars.  I’d seen the first movie, liked it well enough, but just couldn’t grok what all the fuss was about.  But an opportunity is an opportunity—and a good story is a good story, no matter what fictional universe it’s set in—so I got to work crafting a tale about Lando Calrissian and his encounter with a legendary rebel fighter, of my own creation, named Cody Sunn-Childe. 

Note the name, please:  Cody Sunn-Childe.  You see, my son Cody was born right around the time I got the assignment and, y’know, he’s my son.  And  my child.  So...

Okay, okay:  it wasn’t the most brilliant name for a character, but it meant something to me.

And so did the story.  As noted, I was new to comics, but I’d been writing—and, of course, reading—them long enough to know that the violent solutions presented in those magical, larger-than-life stories were often simplistic and, on occasion (maybe many occasions) stupid and harmful.  (I know we’ve gone over this ground before, talking about my IDW series The Life and Times of Savior 28—but this Star Wars story predates even the original glimmer of that idea.)  So I thought it would be an interesting touch to have Cody Sunn-Childe, this great warrior that Lando Calrissian idolized, go through a spiritual transformation and become a pacifist:  a man, totally disgusted by violence, who was seeking a different way to live his life.  



In the end, although an attack by the Empire tempts Sunn-Childe to return to his old ways, he decides that it’s better to allow himself to be killed, to die for a dream of peace, than to go down fighting.  His followers agree—and die by his side during the Empire’s assault.  (A side note:  a year or so before, I’d written an issue of Gold Key’s Buck Rogers that dealt with similar themes.  That was an equally-noble—but far clunkier—take on the material and I welcomed the chance to attempt the idea again in this new context.)

Keep in mind that I didn’t belittle the Star Wars characters, or their beliefs, in any way:  I was just presenting another point of view while keeping Calrissian and company true to their roots.  They had their views, Sunn-Childe had his:  let the readers decide who, if anyone, was right.  

“The Dreams of Cody Sunn-Childe” wasn’t a brilliant piece of work by any means (it was better than the Buck Rogers version, but I was still too new, and too raw, a writer to do the idea justice), but I think it had something of value to say.  And it was a “something” I wanted to pass on to my newborn son—which is why I named that new character after him.

Louise made some changes to my plot along the way—actually, her overeager assistant editor, a curly-haired lad named Fingeroth, made the changes, and I’ve been giving the poor guy grief about it ever since—but nothing that altered the fundamental point of my story.  The great Carmine Infantino drew the story, I wrote the final script (we were working “Marvel Style” in those days:  plot, then art, then dialogue), Louise edited it and the book went off to the Lucasfilm reps for approval. 

They weren’t happy.

Why?  It seemed that, to them, the very idea that a character in the Star Wars universe would voice an opinion that in any way contradicted the Skywalker Worldview was offensive.  The word came down that Sunn-Childe, in rejecting violence, made their characters look bad.  In other words, their universe wasn’t big enough to contain one single person with a point of view that suggested that non-violence was a reasonable alternative to war.  (So much for my follow-up story about Princess Leia traveling through time to meet Martin Luther King and Gandhi.)

Louise had no choice, this was a high-profile license and Marvel had to keep the Lucas people happy:  new dialogue was written for the last page—not by me!—and I’ll never forget these lines that were added:  “He created a dream city where he could live in peace,” Calrissian said, “but he was wrong. Lofty ideals alone just aren't enough when dealing with the Empire...as he found out.”  No maybes about it:  Cody Sunn-Childe was an idiot who sacrificed his life for nothing.  (There was other lines added about letting the Empire’s ships—which had been damaged—rot in other-dimensional space.  This, we were led to believe, would have made Sunn-Childe happy.  A moment while I bang my head against the wall, for old time’s sake.)

To me, the Lucas people were the ones who were wrong; so wrong, in fact, that I took my name off the story, replacing it with the admittedly, and intentionally, ridiculous nom de plume Wally Lombego.  Looking back, I’m amazed that I did it:  I was in no position to jeopardize my working relationship with Marvel—or with any publisher.  I had a career to build, a new family to support.  But I simply couldn’t put my name on a story—dedicated to my son—that now meant exactly the opposite of what I intended.

To her credit, Louise totally understood my position—and no one at Marvel ever gave me any grief about it.  (In fact, not long afterwards I signed an exclusive writing contract with the company, so clearly no harm was done.)  Of course I never wrote another Star Wars story, but I really didn't mind.

© copyright 2010 J.M. DeMatteis