Before anything else is said, happy birthday Star Wars. There were times in the 80's when I didn't think it would last, but here we are stronger than ever and looking to the future.

Back in 1982 while waiting for Return of the Jedi (or Revenge of the Jedi as it was then known) my 11 year old self wrote a story in late May that didn't alter time, speed up the harvest or teleport me anywhere but certainly had a huge impact on my own life. Following on from June's cover dated issue 157 of Empire Strikes Back monthly and a story entitled 'Hello Bespin, Gooddbye' I wrote my own story called Quest for Freedom. The 11 year old me decided to write a proper BIG Star Wars epic, with intrigue, new characters and space battles against a deadly Imperial weapon, all the while searching for the lost Han Solo. In fact, that first version of the story had Solo found and rescued by Lando and Chewie (my main protagonists), along with Luke and Leia and a new character, Jan Lomona.
Readers of Lightsabre may recognise the name.
Anyway, QFF started me off on my fan fiction path, with a rewrite in '83 and a sequel the same year (The Lydon Legacy) followed by the start of part three (The Search Continues) that was never finished.
Well, not yet.

Now, 25 years on and 8 years into Lightsabre it seemed such a fitting time to finally organise something I've always wanted to read - a comic strip version of Quest for Freedom.

By pure luck I happened upon the artist who is drawing the story while collecting my monthly comics list from Nostalgia and Comics in Birmingham. There, on the counter, was a freebie web comic CD (Verse), done by an enterprising university artist called Richard Skidmore. His email address was on the CD, so I mailed, explained the idea and got him on board.
Luckily Rich is a BIG Star Wars fan.

With some very useful advice from friends of the site Otis Frampton and John Jackson Miller I began plotting and storyboarding the story and together me and Richard, along with cover artist Craig Burt and designer and logo artist Tim Wann have embarked on a four part, 32 page adaptation of that first story, Quest for Freedom.

Take a trip to the site and check out issue 1's cover and the first page, and then report back every week for further pages. I think we've knocked it out of the park, and we certainly hope you do too.