How Dark Empire Revived Star Wars Comics for a New Generation

Dark Empire just celebrated its 25th anniversary. During 1991 and 1992, an entirely new Star Wars story made its way to store shelves and some could argue the iconic comic series was single handedly responsible for brining Star Wars back from near oblivion, .

The six issues of Dark Empire featured familiar characters, but the setting was brand new. The characters we thought we knew were a bit older, wiser, darker, and charting a course not even hinted at in the movies.

For fans who have grown up or come to the franchise in the years since Dark Empire, this might not seem surprising or revolutionary. But in 1991, we were at the tail end of a Star Wars drought. Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire had come out a few months before, but it had been years since Star Wars was truly a growing, thriving universe.

Dark Empire changed all that. Tom Veitch, Cam Kennedy, and Dave Dorman (along with countless others who helped bring the books to life) bestowed on Star Wars fandom an incredibly visual, cinematic story that felt like a true successor to the original trilogy. And in so doing, they effectively set precedent and laid the foundation for nearly three decades of Star Wars stories — both narratively and visually.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series, StarWars.com sat down with Tom Veitch (writer) and Dave Dorman (cover artist) to look back at the series, how it came to be, and why its influence continues to echo today. Here are seven insights we learned.

Despite the dearth of new Star Wars content in the late ‘80s, Tom Veitch, Cam Kennedy, and editor Archie Goodwin had a feeling that the franchise “was just taking a nap, waiting for a fresh injection of imagination.” With that in mind, they took a leap of faith and wrote a letter to Lucas, who subsequently asked to see samples of their work. The rest is history.

There was a huge vacuum of products for the Star Wars fandom, from the early ‘80s until 1990. There were no novels released to bookstores and Marvel wasn’t making comics any more. And with no new stories being told and no merchandise in the stores, it was a financial risk.

“The fact that Dark Empire is still popular today,” Dorman says, “given the reactions I still get at conventions, from both older and a new generation of readers who weren’t even born when it was released, shows me how timeless the material really was. I believe everybody involved in the project had a genuine love and affection for the material. That love, I believe, showed through to the public.”

Dark Empire indeed played a pivotal role in reviving Star Wars as a franchise and giving birth to the Expanded Universe, now known as Legends. It kicked off nearly 25 years of Star Wars storytelling at Dark Horse Comics and was instrumental to some of the most influential stories.