Star Wars The Empire Cover - P 2014
Steve Firchow/Marvel EntertainmentFans looking to build up their tolerance to the Force in advance of next year’s release of Star Wars: Episode VII got some good news Wednesday when Marvel Entertainment announced that, in addition to its three new Star Wars series and reprint program for the original Marvel Star Wars comics of the 1970s and ‘80s, it would additionally reissue material published by Dark Horse Comics over the last two decades.
Although it’s unclear how much of the Dark Horse material produced between 1991 and 2014 will be reprinted, the stories will be repackaged in Marvel’s Epic Collection format — full-color paperbacks collecting around 20 single issues at a time — under the overall series title Star Wars Legends (the title created in April to specifically identify material that is not part of the newly created “official canon” of the Star Wars universe).
According to Marvel svp sales and marketing David Gabriel, the new collections will “be bouncing around to different periods of Star Wars history with each Epic Collection, constructing one huge tapestry, collecting full unbroken runs of all the greatest Star Wars comics from the past 35 years.”
Well, somewhat unbroken, at least. The first collection, April 2015’s Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The Empire Vol. 1, collects material from four different series to create a chronologically specific retelling of the events directly following the movie Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and the rise of the Galactic Empire — the same period explored in the new Disney XD series Star Wars: Rebels.
The final original material published by Dark Horse Comics was released this month, with the last issues of Star Wars, Star Wars: Legacy and Star Wars: Darth Maul — Son of Dathomir. Marvel’s original Star Wars material begins in January 2015 with the first issue of its own Star Wars series.
