The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comic adaptation was published by Marvel Comics from June - July 1989 as a four-issue series. The comic was later collected in Omnibus: The Further Adventures Volume 3, from Dark Horse Comics in 2010.
Plot summary[]
1938. Indiana Jones completes his lifelong request to recover the Cross of Coronado from a ruthless collector, resulting in his enemy's death at sea. Stateside, he is approached by a wealthy antique dealer and businessman named Walter Donovan who claims to have clues to the final resting place of the Holy Grail, the sacred cup said to bring eternal life to whoever drinks from it. Jones is not interested...until Donovan reveals that his father, Henry Jones, was originally his project leader and has gone missing in Venice. Accompanied by Marcus Brody, Indy travels to Venice where he meets the enchanting Dr. Elsa Schneider, and they are attacked by members of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
Eventually, a tipoff leads Indy to a gloomy castle on the Austrian-German border, where he is reunited with his father...and discovers, to his horror, that his old enemies the Nazis are involved. Worse, both Donovan and Elsa are cooperating with them, because the want the Grail for themselves. Using Henry's diary he and the Nazis plan to seek the Grail in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon in Hatay. Jones and his father escape from the sadistic Colonel Vogel, and find themselves in a race to both avoid being killed by the Nazis, but also to beat them, Donovan and Elsa to Hatay, lest the Grail fall into their hands.
Differences from the film[]
The comic differs from the film on several minor points, many of them similar to the novelization:
- When Indiana Jones and Herman Mueller discover Garth and his gang looting Utah's caves and finding the Cross of Coronado, they do so by watching them while ducking for cover in the same cave, instead of watching them from afar in a cave above them. Thus, Indy is just discovered by Garth and his men by Roscoe coincidentally turning around.
- The chase scene between Indy and Garth's gang happens drastically different: as he gets pursued by Garth, his men, Panama Hat and his driver, the latter two approach Indy close enough to Indy to notice them early on the chase, when trying to catch Indy and while trying to avoid Garth, Indy jumps into Garth's car and Garth jumps into Indy's horse, but Indy tricks him into going back to his vehicle and leaving him the horse due to forgetting the Cross there. To enter into the reptile wagon, Indy opens a trapdoor from the wagon's roof, the bridge that sends Indy to the snakes upon breaking falls off thanks to Half Breed landing on it, the rhinoceros doesn't appear, Indy uses a water tower to enter into the lion's wagon, doesn't cut himself with his whip, Garth rescues him without asking him to throw him the whip and Indy never goes into the Doctor Fantasy's Magic Caboose wagon to escape, instead jumping off the train.
- Herman doesn't play his trumpet upon coming with the Sheriff.
- Garth is the only graverobber who comes to the Jones residence to retrieve the Cross from the Sheriff (though the Sheriff's mention that Garth has five or six witnesses suggests that his men survived the chase) while Panama Hat looks from outside the house without leaving his vehicle, putting it on his pocket before giving Indy his fedora to cheer him up. Additionally, the Sheriff makes a cruel comment about Anna Mary Jones turning on her grave if she discovered that her son committed theft and Indy silently swears to himself that he will retrieve the Cross of Coronado after Garth gifts him his fedora.
- Indy isn't bleeding aboard the Vasquez de Coronado.
- Panama Hat is wearing beige clothes.
- Indy is temporarily trapped with a fishnet by one of Panama Hat's sailors.
- Panama Hat's hat isn't shown floating after the Vasquez explodes.
- It's shown that Indy was able to make it back to civilization thanks to an American freighter navigating around the Portuguese coast.
- Indy doesn't mention Tyree during his class at Barnett College, instead mentioning the Knights of the Round Table and Atlantis as nonsense to convince his students that "X never marks the spot".
- When Indy is picked up by Walter Donovan's men, he goes with them because he notices that one of them has a gun in a shoulder holster under his jacket, not wishing to endanger his students.
- Mrs. Donovan is absent.
- Donovan drops Indy and Marcus Brody at the airport with a blue tuxedo rather than his signature black one.
- Upon arriving at Venice, Indy and Marcus witness a Fascist official kicking a boy.
- Indy doesn't subtly steal a flower from a Flower Girl.
- Indy doesn't say where he thinks the X (the Roman symbol for 10) is in the Biblioteca di San Barnaba, but instead thinks it before finding out and shouting at his discovery. He also doesn't say it from the second floor but from a bookshelf's ladder.
- Indy just opens the lid to the Tomb of Sir Richard by removing it with his fingers instead of smashing a metal cordon post against it, thus leading to the Librarian's absence.
- A Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword member knocks Brody out immediately as Indy and Elsa Schneider get into the Venetian catacombs and does so behind a bookshelf, without Brody being looking at the entrance of the Venetian catacombs.
- Instead of holding Elsa to cross the rats, Indy and Elsa simpy go through them by a ledge.
- A rat is burned alive as Indy and Elsa survive the fire with Sir Richard's rock casket.
- Elsa randomly tells Indy that she won a silver medal in the Olympic Games of 1932 among other details when Indy asks her if she knows how to swim.
- Elsa loses her shoes as she swims to safety into the Venetian sewers.
- Indy and Elsa lose their first speedboat to a steamer's propellers, prompting them to jump into the one being used by the Brotherhood members trying to kill them.
- Indy notices Kazim's tattoo on his chest when Kazim's shirt gets ripped open during their fistfight on the boat, rather than Kazim showing it to him afterwards.
- The scene in which Indy and Elsa prepare to have sex is ommitted.
- The Butler of Castle Brunwald mocks Indy by saying that if he is a English lord (not a Scottish one), he is Jesse Owens instead of Mickey Mouse.
- Indy doesn't say how much he hates Nazis, instead ducking for cover upon seeing that Schutzstaffel officers are all over the castle.
- To find the room where his father is locked in, Indy and Elsa follow an elderly servant with soup.
- To break into the room where his father is, Indy goes with Elsa to a room that is adjoined to the one where Indy's dad is locked in, instead of Indy needing to swing with his whip from one tower to another.
- Indy kills all three of the Nazis, who have black uniforms instead of gray ones, in Henry's room instead of just knocking out the Principal SS Officer at Castle.
- Rather than saying that he discovered Elsa was a Nazi because she spoke about her allegiances in her sleep, Henry responds to Indy that he knew she was a Nazi because he simply didn't trust her.
- Marcus is abducted at the Iskenderun train station, plus Sallah tries to help him escape from Sinister Man and the Second Man by making a camel spits its mucus on the latter.
- The Female Officer in the film is completely absent in the comic. All of the Nazi officers in the communications room are male and they are not sealed in the burning room: they merely rush in (deducing the presence of the Joneses immediately instead of the second time they go through the fireplace passage), and Indy and Henry go through the fireplace door (standing over the fireplace instead of hiding inside the chimney), proceeding to escape while the Nazis react to the fire.
- Ernst Vogel doesn't appear marching with his troops over Castñe Brunwald to find the Joneses.
- The secret passageway isn't under some stairs but behind a couch, which Henry Jones doesn't activate by sitting on it like he does in the film with a chair. Instead, Indy kneels on the couch and pushes the wall, leading father and son to fall through the wall over the stairs leading to aan underground area full of boats (which is inside a cave rather than outside of the castle), with the stairs not being a spiral staircase.
- The Motorcycle Chase doesn't happen. Unlike the film, Vogel and his men do leave Castle Brunwold through a speedboat but don't go back despite finding the Joneses were still there and shooting at them. Also, Indy and his father don't send a decoy speedboat to trick the Nazis and instead take the sidecar to leave the premises.
- During the Hitler Rally, Indy doesn't threaten to choke Elsa (who is dressed in a formal gray attire instead of her Nazi military black one), bumps into Hitler while arguing with Elsa about her true allegiances, isn't pushed aside by one of Hitler's men once Hitler signs the diary and is faced by a German officer who mistakes Indy for a SS officer so orders him back to his post, leading Indy to knock him out by making the Nazi salute to strike him on the face before leaving the rally.
- Once aboard the D-138, Indy sits besides his father instead of in front of him, Vogel sits on one of the zeppelin's chairs, gets knocked by Indy dressed as a ticket taker without him interrogating Henry Jones off the zeppelin as this lifts up instead of before taking off, in addition that none of the passengers show their tickets scared after Indy excuses Vogel's exit as his "punishment" for not having a ticket.
- Indy and his father don't argue about Henry's parenting skills, making their flight more pleasant.
- While aboard the zeppelin, Indy and Henry are chased by a Gestapo agent. He and a World War I pilot he drafts into service attempt to follow the Joneses in a second biplane, but crash.
- The Gestapo officer who tries to follow the Jones is depicted inconsistently: at first, he looks like a middle-aged man with some wrinkles and gray hair but by the time he and the World War I ace find a second German biplane to follow them, the officer resembles Pat Roach's younger character in the film much more.
- The Citroën 11 Légère Cabriolet's owner is an apparently German man Indy calls Fritz and who he takes out from his vehicle as he drives it, instead of the elderly man who was changing his car's tire and didn't notice the Joneses stealing vehicle until it was too late.
- The first German pilot immediately dies upon trying to follow the Joneses into the tunnel, as his plane explodes the moment its wings crash with the structure, without his scene of looking at the Joneses seconds before his death. Likewise, the second German pilot leads the Joneses to jump out from their getaway vehicle by shooting at it so Henry scares the seagulls with his hands instead of his umbrella, in addition that we get a description of what the pilot thought before crashing.
- Marcus is never seen accompanying Donovan and Schneider as their prisoner, instead being inside the Mark VII Tank with Vogel from the beginning and Elsa serves as Donovan's driver instead of Helmut (though the first time we see Donovan talking with Marcus, the driver seems to be male).
- Sallah makes no mention of the car he took to Hatay belonging to Omar when the Nazis blow it up.
- During the ambush by the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, the two Nazis who throw grenades don't throw any at them to the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword due to being absent. However, as a grenade destroys Sallah's car, it may be possible that the two grenade throwing Nazis (or at least one) were the ones who destroyed the car and, with the art open to interpretation, may have been among the Nazis killed by the Brotherhood.
- Kazim (oddly still wearing his pinstriped suit) is shot in the back by Donovan.
- Despite Kazim's death, no other Brotherhood members are shown to die, which may suggest that some of them survived in this adaptation.
- All of the tank crew are Germans. By the way, the Sultan of Hatay never makes an appearance, yet Hatayans still appear when the Nazis reach the Temple of the Sun.
- Instead of a Kübelwagen, the Nazi car that hits the tank is Donovan's 1926 Renault 6CV Torpédo staff car, oddly without Donovan in it. While the car doesn't get stuck on the cannon, Vogel still blasts it off, though one of the two Nazis from the staff car seems to either escape from the car before it gets blasted or falls off from it upon getting on the tank's way.
- Indy and Vogel don't engage in a firefight nor Indy uses his horse to jump from a little high road (instead jumping on it while riding at its side) or stucks the bank's gun with a rock.
- During The Tank Chase, Vogel doesn't come out from the tank until Indy defeats the four Nazi soldiers that come in another truck to assist the colonel. While Indy kills three like he does in the film, he punches the first one and shoots his companions as they all stand in his fire line, with the way Indy shoots at them involves the bullet passing through the second one's shoulder, the third one's stomach and the fourth one's head, which actually kills the fourth Nazi before he could have a chance to board the tank. On the other hand, the first Nazi is just beaten by Indy and the last he is seen Indy is punching him but by the next panel we see the tank's exterior, he is no longer there, implying that he was either crushed by the tank like the fourth Nazi did in the film or fell off the tank into the desert like in the film, yet alive.
- The Periscope Soldier is absent.
- Henry comes out from the tank's hatch a lot earlier to cheer Indy as he fights, inadvertently causing a distraction for calling him "Junior" for Vogel to try to strangle him with a chain. When the tank crewman tries to pull him back into the tank's bowels, the elder Jones just squirts the ink of his pen into one of the crewman's eyes and then knocks him out with a punch instead of just squirting him with ink and that simply leaving the crewman's unconscious. Furthermore, rather than Marcus saying that the pen is mightiest than the sword, it's Henry the one who says this.
- Curiously, while the crewman never recovers consciousness and thus never fires his gun, the tank still goes off the cliff even though the Hatay Tank Driver doesn't appear in the story, suggesting that maybe the crewman and Vogel were the only Nazis aboard.
- Henry doesn't use the tank's gun to blow up another truck full of Nazis, thus doesn't interfere in the battle of Indy and Vogel, so Indy doesn't have to hang on his dear life from the blasted gun nor Vogel attempts to crush him against a rocky wall.
- Vogel doesn't bring a shovel nor loses his hat, so Marcus jumps on his own to Sallah instead of being knocked off the tank. While Sallah still rescues Henry like in the film, Indy has to give Sallah his whip so he can save Henry from being crushed by the tank treads.
- Vogel's death is different. He gets tangled in the chain he was using as a weapon against Indy, and he and Indy get tangled together. They jump off the tank, but the chain gets stuck, and although Indy manages to free himself, Vogel remains tangled and is pulled over the cliff by the falling tank. In the film, he doesn't die from the tangled chain; he uses the chain to try to strangle Indy but falls from the tank when it stumbles over a cliff, grabbing from the hatch all the way.
- Indy's apparent death doesn't last too long, with both Henry and Sallah not getting to say anything before Indy appears behind them and tells everyone he barely managed to escape.
- Massad's corpse after being decapitated is seen out of the entrance to the Breath of God trap, whereas his corpse should have stayed on the trap room and his head should have been the only part to roll away from the trap.
- The comic itself identifies the first decapitated guard as Massad, whereas he was unnamed in the film and other adaptations.
- The Hatay Soldier in Temple wears a white attire, has a moustache and acts more confident and less nervous than his film version, swearing to himself that while Massad horribly died through unseen means, he will make it because he is more cunning before he gets beheaded as well.
- Henry falls back upon being shot instead of standing until he starts bleeding out. Similarly, Indy doesn't try to lunge at Donovan.
- The blade trap from the Breath of God is just one instead of two.
- Indy comes out from the Breath of God room to inform Donovan and Schneider that they can pass instead of telling that to them from inside the room.
- Indy jumps into the Path of God instead of just trying to walk on it, falling on the sidewalk which makes him realize its presence, though as he jumps, he privately remarks in his toughts that at the very least the sidewalk doesn't have any snakes.
- The Grail Knight doesn't try to fight Indy, welcoming him the chamber the moment he enters, though he still offers Indy to take over his mantle as the Holy Grail's protector.
- Elsa asks Donovan to let her choose the Grail for him, instead of Donovan requesting her expertise to choose the right one like he does in the film.
- Donovan simply swears "Eternal Life!" instead of "For Eternal Life!", proceeding to put a pleasure face before the False Grail takes his life.
- Donovan ages to death much faster than in the film and doesn't attack Elsa before falling dead. Consequently, Indy doesn't push him against a wall though Elsa is still scared by him, plus Donovan's clothes don't age with him and stay normal as Donovan dies.
- Elsa doesn't mention that the Holy Grail must be the cup of a carpenter, instead Indy takes the Holy Grail by himself and thinks about this without telling anyone, after which the Grail Knight notifies him of his wise decision.
- All of the Nazi and Hatayan soldiers are frightened by the Holy Grail's miraculous healing of Henry Jones and run away (thus sparing themselves from the temple's collapse even earlier), whereas in the film they all stayed there.
- The Grail Knight follows Indy and Elsa out of the Grail chamber under the impression that Indy is an errant that plans to succeed him (as Indy didn't have time to tell him he wasn't interested in protecting the Holy Grail) into the temple proper and there delivers his warning about not taking the Grail past the Great Seal the moment Elsa snatches the Grail as Indy prepared to give it back to him.
- Henry talks with the Grail Knight about how Indy isn't just an errant, but his errant son.
- The temple's destruction is immediately triggered the moment Elsa crosses the Great Seal in comparison to how the temple took its time to completely collapse in the film.
- The abysm in which Elsa falls doesn't have any kind of mist.
- Apparently none of the Joneses nor their friends wave back at the Grail Knight as the temple collapses.
- Indy and his father don't mention the origins of his well-known nickname before departing from the Republic of Hatay.
Appearances[]
Characters[]
- Miss Appleton (Mentioned only)
- Marcus Brody
- Butler
- Walter Donovan
- Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir
- Fedora
- German Officer at Hitler Rally
- Gestapo Agent
- Grail Knight
- Half Breed
- Hatay Soldier
- Havelock
- Adolf Hitler
- Irene
- Anna Mary Jones (Mentioned only)
- Henry Walton Jones, Sr.
- Indiana Jones
- Kazim
- Massad (Remains)
- Herman Mueller
- Panama Hat
- Principal SS Officer
- Richard (Remains)
- Roscoe
- Rough Rider
- Elsa Schneider
- Sheriff
- Ernst Vogel
- World War One Ace
Miscellanea[]
Behind the scenes[]
In the second issue, Walter Donovan mispells Elsa Schneider's name "Elsa Schnieder".
Collections[]
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Holiday Special
- Omnibus: The Further Adventures Volume 3
Issues[]
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 2
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 3
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 4
