A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art by Dave Dornan. © 1991, 2010 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Following the deaths of Darth Vader and the Emperor at the Battle of Endor, the Rebel Alliance formed a New Republic over much of the galaxy. Long years of struggle have ensued. Remnants of the Empire have regained strength and reclaimed the majority of worlds, including the city-world of Coruscant. Now a civil war within the resurgent Empire has erupted, and the New Republic has seized the opportunity to increase confusion. A recent raid over Coruscant has left Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian stranded on the war-torn planet, but help is on the way...- Opening crawl, Dark Empire On September 15, 2010, Dark Horse Comics published Star Wars: Dark Empire Trilogy, a 352-page hardcover volume that collected Tom Veitch's 1991-1995 Expanded Universe trilogy of stories in which the fledgling New Republic's legendary heroes - Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Land...

Trade Paperback Edition cover art by Christopher Moeller. ©1997 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In 1996, almost a year before the theatrical release of  The Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition, Lucasfilm's marketing division conceived a massive multimedia campaign called Shadows of the Empire. Centered on Steve Perry's eponymous novel set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the project included an original soundtrack album, Nintendo video game, a set of Kenner/Hasbro action figures, a behind the scenes book by Mark Cotta Vaz, Topps trading cards, and even references to its events in Brian Daley's Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – The Radio Drama.   In Steve Perry's own words, the unofficial tagline for this massive campaign was "Everything but the movie." "Everything but the movie" included, naturally, a comics adaptation, and Dark Horse Comics – an Oregon-based publisher which at the time owned the licensing ri...

Cover art by Mathieu Laffray. (C) 2009 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On December 16, 2009,  Dark Horse Comics published Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, a 420-page hardcover collection of the comics adaptations of the 1991-1993 three-book cycle of novels by Timothy Zahn. Written by Mike Baron and featuring the art of three different artistic teams, The Thrawn Trilogy collects issues 1-6 of Heir to the Empire, issues 1-6 of Dark Force Rising, and issues 1-6 of The Last Command in one volume for the first time. In 1991, after a five-year "dry spell" in which no new Star Wars fiction saw print, Bantam Spectra published Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire, which raised interest in that galaxy far, far away to a level that had not been seen since the release of the "last" of the films, Return of the Jedi . Later that same year, Dark Horse Comics obtained the Star Wars comic-book license, and a merging of interests seemed inevitable. ...

(C) 2016 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. Cover art by Mike Mayhew On November 29, 2016, Marvel Comics published Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, a hardcover volume that collects all four issues of the comics adaptation of the eponymous space-fantasy film by writer-director George Lucas. These comics (and a similar trade paperback compilation) were originally published by Dark Horse Comics in 2005; Marvel, which regained the license to publish Star Wars content in 2014, has also reissued Dark Horse's other Prequel Era adaptations, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, as part of a collection that encompasses the entire Star Wars movie saga. Writer Christopher Cerasi (using the pen name "Miles Lane" in the original Dark Horse edition) and artist Doug Wheatley follow the story in Lucas's screenplay closely, even using the same title crawl text from the finished film. (For some reason, the "crawl" appears twice in this compilation. Fir...

(C) 2016 by Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Limited. Cover art by Mike Mayhew With the success of its 2015 hardcover re-mastered reissues of its classic Star Wars Trilogy comic adaptation, Marvel Comics decided to give the Prequel Trilogy a similar re-release the following year. Starting with the May 24 publication of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace , Marvel collected all four issues of Dark Horse Comics’ 2002 adaptation of Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the second installment of George Lucas’s “Tragedy of Darth Vader” saga. Written by Henry Gilroy – a screenwriter who has worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels – and drawn by Jan Duursema ( Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi ), the four-issue series tells the tale of a corrupt Republic’s gradual transformation into an authoritarian dictatorship, an ambitious Jedi apprentice’s stormy relationship with his Master, and a star-crossed romance that will ultimately affect the fate of the galaxy. ...

(C) 2016 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. Cover art by Mike Mayhew In May of 1999, Dark Horse Comics (which then had the license to publish Star Wars comics) released Issue No. 1 of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Written by Henry Gilroy and illustrated by Rodolfo Damaggio (with inks by the late Al Williamson, who had worked on the syndicated newspaper  Star Wars comic strip with Archie Goodwin, plus Marvel's adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi ). the first of four issues covered the first 30 minutes or so of George Lucas's 1999 space-fantasy film.  Later that year, Dark Horse collected all four issues in a trade paperback edition simply titled Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  Like most comic books based on the  Star Wars  movies, the four-issue series successfully taps into the spirit of The Phantom Menace, even though some of the events are moved around or compressed to fit the requirements of the printed...