About 3 weeks to a month before.
You would think the insufficiently_thoughtful_person who professes to be so knowledgeable about Star Wars comics would know that?
Nice catch. Not sure what I was thinking when I posted that.
Actually 6 weeks to be exact...Star Wars #1 began shipping on March 8th, 1977 with a street date of April 12th 1977. The first two issues of Star Wars were out before the movie opened up.
Jim
Do we have any documentation for that?
From the US Copyright Office database, all I can find is this:
http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=15&ti=1,15&Search_Arg=%22star%20wars%22%20marvel%20comic%201977&Search_Code=FT*&CNT=25&PID=-ilrWPUU_MbSauLjDyyU7d8aJwgfq&SEQ=20141119171658&SID=5
Star Wars 4 was published on 06/14/1977. Assuming a monthly publishing schedule, we would have:
Star Wars 1 03/1977
Star Wars 2 04/1977
Star Wars 3 05/1977
Star Wars came out May 25, 1977. It is probably reasonable to assume both issue 1 and 2 were on the stands when the movie came out and 3 was on its way. But I don't have any hard proof of this.
The information shared by jim came from the wookipedia:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_1
I would love to know where the exact dates came from, but the US Copyright Office information seems to support the months at least.
But US Copyright info isn't "on the street", just when it's filed with the office (most likely when the completed OA was sent to the printer, meaning another 2-3 weeks to print.) The most reliable info we have is the cover date: 7/77, at that period, the books were roughly 10-12 weeks ahead of the cover date. The book wasn't on the stands in March, for sure. Marvel has (almost) never been four whole months ahead of cover date, and certainly not at this time period.
April 12th for an on sale date is within reason.
You should re-read my post again. I was supporting the dates supplied by Jim, not refuting them. (thumbs u
I was neither supporting nor refuting either post, just adding to the discussion. Whatever you saw as a challenge to what you posted isn't there. No need to re-read, I understood it perfectly fine the first time.