Dark Horse has lost the rights to produce Star Wars comics, they now belong to Marvel Entertainment. Marvel, like Lucasfilm, is owned by the parent company of Disney.
Much more so than prose novels, comics were always my thing. While I still collect them from time to time, Marvel, in general, was my least favorite publisher. I was DC guy. The near god-like heroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman appealed to me much more than the more down to earth heroes like Spider-Man or Captain America ever would. The one thing in my youth that did draw me to Marvel however, were the Star Wars comics they produced in the late 70's and early 80's. I most vividly remember the covers to the Return of the Jedi adaptation.
A simple trio of characters in front of a star field somehow gave me a dire need to open up the comic and just bask in it.
There are also some very bad things associated with the Marvel stewardship of the Star Wars brand, in particular Jaxxon the green rabbit creature that is much maligned. Critics of the news that Disney has shifted the comic book rights under back to Marvel, immediately jump to the conclusion that we're going back to the bad 'ole Jaxxon days. However this is not the same Marvel that existed back in the 70's and 80's. Marvel now has an amazing stable of talent, both writers and artists, many of which I would LOVE to see create new Star Wars content. For me, the list begins and ends with
Chris Bachalo.
As far as stories go, I personally am a proponent of there being a new blank slate as far as EU to come (more on that in another time). While certainly a possibility, I don't think Marvel would continue the storylines created at Dark Horse. What would be a wonderful, albeit a pipe dream, but Marvel could take the initiative to re-work old stories to fit into the new Disney continuity. What we are likely to see is a series based off of Star Wars Rebels, and then a slow trickling out of series after each movie, perhaps to expand upon the events within the movies, as opposed to whole new adventures starring those characters. Marvel and Dark Horse both fell into that pitfall before. The comic books that take place between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back by Marvel, as well as those surrounding The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars by Dark Horse have now largely been retconned (Durge, and Ki-Adi's wife and family for example). I have to believe that Marvel as well as Lucasfilm would take these past missteps to heart when deciding the franchise's new direction in comics.
While yes, Dark Horse losing the licences is a sign of Disney's grand corporate strategies, we shouldn't put on our rose colored glasses just yet, and let Dark Horse off the hook. Aside from the Legacy series, Dark Horse's Star Wars output in recent years has been pretty lackluster. The myriad of Darth Vader mini-series, series taking place 20,000 years in the past, and Brian Wood's "Star Wars" flagship series that feels so off the mark, it did little to spark interest in the comics arm Star Wars. It's almost as if they were trying to lose the license. Face facts: Dark Horse has been spinning its wheels.
So let's look to the future, Marvel may be able to get some traction going to get people to take Star Wars comics seriously again, perhaps in this new generation of fans some wide-eyed kid will walk into a comic shop and have the same reaction to a Marvel Star Wars book that I had when I first saw Dark Empire in those dark days of the late 80's early 90's. Marvel has the talent, and if the Force isn't with them, Disney certainly is.
