Star Wars: Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: Empire ends one of its stories with a stormtrooper named TK-622, watching Luke Skywalker's X-wing fire into the Death Star's thermal exhaust port. In his last seconds, he knows the station is about to explode, and he thinks back over his whole life. That single image, an ordinary soldier watching the Battle of Yavin from the losing side, sets the tone for everything the series does. Dark Horse Comics released the first issue on the 4th of September 2002. The series ran for 40 issues before continuing directly into a follow-up series called Star Wars: Rebellion. Across those issues, the anthology moves between throne rooms and TIE fighter cockpits. It follows officers, bounty hunters, and rebel soldiers who never got a scene in the films. What does the day to day work of running an empire look like, and what does resisting it actually cost the people who try?

• 2. The Officer Corps

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  On Coruscant, Vader tests a newly trained stormtrooper battalion's blaster accuracy alongside Grand Moff Trachta and Moff Kadir. He is impressed enough to send the unit to escort Governor Wilhuff Tarkin to the Death Star. Kadir objects, since the men had been assigned to his own Coruscant City Guard. Vader warns him that the previous commander of Coruscant Security made the same kind of demand. Kadir should keep quiet, Vader says, if he wants to avoid his predecessor's fate. Once Vader leaves, Trachta and Kadir grumble about the Sith between themselves. Trachta hints that he may have found a way to deal with what he calls their Sith problem.

  Emperor Palpatine later meets Trachta directly, asking him to supply a skilled detachment of stormtroopers for his own escort to the Death Star. He tells Trachta that he would have put him in charge of the Death Star's construction instead of Tarkin. The only reason he didn't, Palpatine says, is that Trachta is still needed for the Emperor's work on Coruscant. Elsewhere, Vader thinks back to a conversation he once had with Qui-Gon Jinn, before he was ever introduced to the Jedi Council. Palpatine then gives him a new assignment: track down a lightsaber-wielding criminal on the planet Dargulli. Both men suspect the criminal could be one of Vader's own children.

  Four days before the Battle of Yavin, on the planet Ralltiir, Commander Akobi leads Imperial forces. A small rebel cell there grows into a planetwide uprising. The rebels use women and children to defend themselves, jam Imperial communications, and disrupt Imperial sensors. During a bombing run on a rebel supply depot, the TIE bombers' sensors fail, and Akobi orders the strike to continue anyway. The bombers hit a medical center by mistake, killing scores of civilians, and the Empire covers it up, turning Akobi into a hero instead.

  While Akobi works to restore power after the strike, rebels try to bomb him. His bodyguard, a stormtrooper named TK-622, saves his life, and Akobi assumes it was an accident. Both men are then assigned to the Death Star. During a meeting of officers, an RA-7 Death Star Droid opens fire and kills several of them. TK-622 shoots it down before it can do more harm.

  A technician receives the RA-7 droid's remains for study. While the technician scans it, TK-622 finds a hidden order to kill Akobi, moments before the droid's memory banks explode.

  Later, while TK-622 escorts Akobi to a medals ceremony honoring his actions on Ralltiir, a stray probe droid attacks them, and Akobi is severely wounded. Medical teams fight to save him, while TK-622 searches for leads but finds nothing.

  Before he dies, Akobi tells TK-622 what really happened back on Ralltiir. TK-622 then goes to the technician's station, where the technician attacks him, and the two fight as the Battle of Yavin rages outside. Debris from a nearby impact kills the technician, but not before he confesses. He was a Rebel agent from Ralltiir. He was behind both the earlier bombing attempt against Akobi there and the probe droid attack that finally wounded him.

  About five months after the Battle of Yavin, Vader travels to Void Station, an asteroid city, looking for the Bothan information broker Jib Kopatha. Kopatha has given the Empire nothing but speculation for months. Vader tells him he needs real information about the Rebel Alliance to restore the Empire's trust in him.

  Kopatha complies and tries to convince Vader to stay a few days, offering him rich food and women, but Vader turns him down. As he heads back to the hangar to leave, a Falleen woman named Xora approaches, promising him information about the Rebels.

  She leads him into what looks like an empty room, where several Falleen ambush him. They are seeking revenge for his massacre of an entire city on the planet Falleen. Despite being outnumbered, and taking one blow, Vader kills them all. He then grabs Xora by the throat, tells her he doesn't like being reminded of his past, and chokes her to death.

  Fleeing the Battle of Yavin in his Advanced TIE fighter, Vader crash-lands on the planet Vaal, whose only Imperial presence is a small communications outpost. Sergeant Reybn and two other men run it, and prefer relaxing to actual work, reasoning that their posting is one of the Empire's most distant.

  On Vaal, Vader is attacked by a pack of canine creatures, and after killing their leader, the surviving hounds accept him as their new leader. He helps them bring down a large, horned mammal, then walks toward the Imperial outpost with the pack following behind him.

  The outpost crew is stunned into silence, watching Vader board their Lambda-class shuttle. As he leaves, the hounds kill Reybn and the other two men. Vader later tells a commander on Coruscant that the communications outpost on Vaal will need an entirely new crew.

• 3. Faces Of The Rebellion

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  Shortly before the Battle of Yavin, General Jan Dodonna speaks at the funeral of his predecessor, Roons Sewell. He describes how Sewell became a disaffected actor after the Empire killed his love interest. Dodonna then recounts Sewell's later days fighting with the Rebellion, and how he died in battle.

  About six months after the Battle of Yavin, Princess Leia visits Raal Panteer, a childhood love interest, on a moon of Ryloth. She hopes the moon could serve as a new Rebel base. Panteer shows her the jungle's natural wonders, but they are attacked by creatures that live there. Panteer dies, and Leia leaves regretting that she put another society in danger.

  Around the same six-month mark, Supply Officer Deena Shan joins a mission with Han Solo, Chewie, and Leia. The group is forced onto it when they must evacuate the Rebel fleet. Through the crisis, she learns just how devoted the Rebellion's best-known heroes are to one another.

  Eight months after the battle, Luke Skywalker leads a squad of Rebel soldiers into an Empire-run fueling depot. Posing as Imperial officers, they aim to steal fuel and free a valuable prisoner. Their disguise holds only under strict restrictions. The mission grows more complicated once they learn of prisoners taken from Jabiim, a planet the Rebels had recently lost to the Empire. Lieutenant Sunber had been stationed on Jabiim, where he lost many men to the Rebels. Watching how the captured prisoners are treated now makes him question his place in the Imperial army. Welles Hartley, who also wrote the earlier To the Last Man arc, spends five issues on this story. Sunber's doubts about the army he serves stay unresolved.

• 4. Writers And Collections

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  Randy Stradley opens the earliest chapter of the series chronologically with Princess... Warrior, a two-part arc set a year before the Battle of Yavin. Its first issue was published on the 5th of February 2003.

  Issue 7, called Sacrifice, turns to the bounty hunter Boba Fett. It was published on the 9th of April 2003, and later collected in the Boba Fett: Man with a Mission trade paperback.

  Paul Chadwick's four-part Darklighter arc begins on the 21st of May 2003, set shortly before and during the Battle of Yavin.

  A three-part story called To the Last Man follows. Its first issue arrives on the 28th of January 2004, set during the same period as A New Hope.

  Ron Marz's two-part "General" Skywalker arc opens on the 10th of November 2004, roughly seven months after the Battle of Yavin.

  Issue 28, Wreckage, was published on the 29th of December 2004, about seven months after the events of A New Hope.

  Thomas Andrews writes a two-part story, In the Shadows of Their Fathers, beginning on the 23rd of February 2005, roughly eight months after Yavin.

  Issue 31, The Price of Power, came out on the 18th of May 2005. It was collected in October 2006 in the In the Footsteps of Their Fathers trade paperback.

  Issue 35, A Model Officer, was published on the 21st of September 2005. It was collected in January 2007 in The Wrong Side of the War trade paperback.

  Issue 23, The Bravery of Being Out of Range, was published on the 18th of August 2004. It was later collected in the Allies and Adversaries trade paperback.

  Dark Horse eventually gathered the whole run into seven trade paperbacks. Betrayal collects issues 1-4. Darklighter, The Imperial Perspective, and Allies and Adversaries each gather their own arcs. The Heart of the Rebellion also includes a one-shot called A Valentine Story. In the Shadows of Their Fathers and The Wrong Side of the War round out the set. The publisher also reprinted the run across three omnibus volumes. These were Boba Fett, a two-volume set called At War with the Empire, and The Other Sons of Tatooine.

  Vol 7, The Wrong Side of the War, folds A Model Officer in alongside the five-part arc that shares its name. A reader working through the trade paperbacks meets Lieutenant Sunber's story just one issue before his doubts about the Empire take center stage.