Talking About 'Star Wars': Is 'Star Wars' part of the Marvel Universe?

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Marvel Special Edition #3 Featuring Star Wars collected issues 1-6 of the official Star Wars comics adaptation. Cover art by Ernie Chan. © 1977 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Is Star Wars part of the Marvel Universe?
No. The Star Wars franchise (including films, animated and live-action TV series, and novels) properly belongs to Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company founded in 1971 by George Lucas, who ran it until October 2012. That’s when he sold Lucasfilm and all of its intellectual property to The Walt Disney Company for $2.2 billion in cash and $1.855 billion in stock.
Marvel Comics, which itself is now also owned by The Walt Disney Company, has had a long relationship with Star Wars, starting as early as 1976. Back then, the comics publisher was one of the first companies to show interest in Lucas’s space-fantasy film set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Marvel artist Howard Chaykin created the very first Star Wars teaser poster for a 1976 comics convention at the behest of Lucasfilm publicist Charles Lippincott; this poster was later adapted for the cover of Marvel’s Star Wars #1, the first issue of six that comprise the official adaptation of Star Wars (1977).
Marvel Comics Star Wars #1 was published in April of 1977, despite the "July" publication date on the upper left corner. Cover art by Howard Chaykin, based on his San Diego Comic-Con 1976 poster used to promote both the movie and Marvel's comic book adaptation.   © 1977 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Also, it was Stan Lee himself who chose writer-editor Roy Thomas to oversee the adaptation of the original Star Wars film.
Marvel owned the licensing rights to publish Star Wars comics, including original stories which became part of Expanded Universe 1.0 and official adaptations of the Original Trilogy, until the late 1980s.
However, by the time Bantam Spectra published Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Heir to the Empire in 1991, Marvel had not published any issues of its Star Wars comic in over five years and lost its status as a Lucasfilm licensee to Oregon-based Dark Horse Comics.
Dark Horse, interestingly enough, reissued many of the original Marvel Comics in trade paperback omnibus editions. It also revived Archie Goodwin and Carlos Garzon’s Star Wars newspaper comic strips in several hardcover editions. Among the many reprints of Marvel’s 1980s output were the official comics adaptations of the Original Trilogy and the best stories in the original Expanded Universe.
Dark Horse also published its own Star Wars comics, including the controversial Dark Empire Trilogy, the more popular adaptation of Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, and the adaptations of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.
As a result of Disney’s purchases of Marvel Enterprises (2009) and Lucasfilm (2012), the publication rights reverted to Marvel Comics in 2014. And due to the Lucasfilm Story Group’s decision to create one unified canon instead of the baroque pre-2014 multi-tiered “levels of canon” structure, all of the current Marvel Comics Star Wars stories are considered to be canonical.

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