I could do Frank one better. We used to have a local service called Newsfax which would condense the facts of the the local channels news stories and add national news stories onto one 8.5X11 inch sheet of paper. I could read that in less than 15 minutes.
The funny thing is that George Lucas sorta planned for the prequel trilogy. When the first Star Wars film came out in the theaters, it was labeled IV in the opening crawl. I suspect that George had a rough idea for both the original trilogy (episodes IV, V, & VI) and the prequel (episodes I, II, & III) but decided that IV was where he wanted to start this.
It also could have been done as an homage to the Saturday morning movie serials that he watched as a kid. These were cheap films made to bring children to the movie theaters on Saturday Mornings (back in the days before everybody had a TV). A story would be divided into several smaller episodes that the children would watch and would have something like “Flash Gordon III: Ming’s Revenge”. These serials were one of many of George’s inspirations for his “Star Wars” films.
I think that second panel shows Serenity, the Mark IV Firefly class spaceship that was crewed by Malcom Reynolds on the show “Firefly”.