Tuesday, December 29, 2015

"The End" Week: Star Wars #20!


I've been reading a bit of both, and couldn't really tell you if Marvel's Star Wars comics are necessarily any better or worse than Dark Horse's. I read Marvel's original series and loved them to death, but always read Dark Horse's Star Wars only sporadically. Partially because they had a pretty hefty output for the years they carried the license, 1991 to 2014. This series (set pre-the Empire Strikes Back) wasn't even a year old when the announcement came that the license was going to leave Dark Horse: from 2014, Star Wars #20, written by Brian Wood, art by Carlos D'anda, with a cover by Hugh Fleming.

Seren Song, a childhood friend of Leia's had been working as a spy for years--allegedly since "the very earliest days of the Rebellion," although I don't know if the timeline figures there--and calls Leia when she wants to come in. Simple enough, except she's being tailed by IG-88, and the bounty-hunting droid may have the Millenium Falcon's number:

Still, even an untrained Luke is able to use the Force well enough to shoot down IG-88, and Seren is saved. The secrets she stole from the Empire seem harmless enough, but could hold clues to where the Alliance could hide a secret base...but this would be the end, since the new Marvel stories would have their own continuity.

This was a perfectly fine comic, but per the Comichron sales charts for August, 2014, this issue would come in at #84 for the month with 26,645 copies sold. Per the Beat, Marvel's first issue sold over a million, and the series was still over a hundred thousand six months later.

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