Star Wars Weekly 98 COVER by CARMINE INFANTINO

This cover, while not a 'perfect example' of a vintage Infantino Cover, still hits a lot of nerdbuttons for me. Just look at those classic examples of Infantino X-Wing and T.I.E. fighter. (Though one might note the split-engine X-Wing, which suggests Infantino was using early McQuarrie concept drawings as ship reference.)

A few obvious things to note here.

For whatever reason, Infantino decided to execute this cover on an American-proportioned and formatted page. (You can see the difference if you compare with other U.K. examples, such as HERE and HERE) So the proportions are off from the get-go; British weekly comics are wider in their magazine-shaped format.

It looks to me that part-way through, Editorial saw that significant changes were going to be needed to conform with UK print proportions. Even so, someone had already begun the process of attaching the cover dress anyway (you can tell from the glue residue and correction fluid). Those premature cover elements would have needed to have been removed before flip-flopping the image to a 'stat' copy so that the 'floating head' of Luke Skywalker would be facing away from the fold, a typical editorial preference to this day. Additional 'starfield' artwork was then added to that stat copy (by John Tartaglione or Howard Bender, I'd bet), details which are missing on this original.

To hopefully improve its display-ability, I've generated a replica of the original cover dress on a clear acetate page to go along with the cover (which is otherwise untouched). Working from a hi-rez scan of the final published cover, I've retained as much of the background 'starfield' art as I could, (though horizontally flipped) to produce an effect approximating how it may have looked had the U.S. proportions been retained.