At San Diego Comic-Con on Friday during the “Cup O’ Joe” panel featuring Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada the comic book publisher revealed its plans for the launch of its new Star Wars license.
Beginning in January of 2015 (Dark Horse Comics’ license expires in December 2014) Marvel Comics will publish two on-going series and one mini-series.
The first on-going book is simply titled, Star Wars, and will be written by Jason Aaron with art fromJohn Cassaday. This book will launch in January 2015.
The second on-going book is Star Wars: Darth Vader and will feature writer Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larroca. This book will launch February 2015.
The third book will be Star Wars: Princess Leia by writer Mark Waid and artist Terry Dobson. This will be a five-issue miniseries and is set to launch in March 2015.
According to Lucasfilm the Marvel comics will be considered part of the new official canon.
All canonical within the Star Wars universe, each book will pick up where Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope left off, filling in important, previously unexplored gaps for some of the saga’s most iconic characters.
One thing that sticks out to me is that Marvel is writing books that are all set during the same period of time and in the two on-going series tell pieces of the same story from different perspectives. This means that the continuity footprint of what Marvel is producing at first will be rather small. This should make it easier for editors and the Lucasfilm Story Group to get the new canon established some of the major sign posts planted and hopefully avoid any serious missteps in the early days. This is a cautious yet prudent approach to the relaunch of the published comic book fiction line.
Look for more on these books as well as other potential titles from Marvel as we get closer to January of 2015.
Source: StarWars.com