Star Wars Tales

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars Tales launched on the 29th of September, 1999, as something no major franchise comic had quite tried before: a regular anthology series with no single hero, no ongoing plot, and no obligation to be taken seriously. Dark Horse Comics published each 64-page issue as a collection of unrelated short stories drawn from across the entire Star Wars timeline, from 3,993 years before the Battle of Yavin all the way to 40 years after it. The series ran for exactly 24 issues before closing on the 13th of July, 2005. What makes those six years genuinely strange is the question of what any given story was worth. Some tales were firmly inside Star Wars canon. Others were pure fantasy, jokes, and what-ifs. And the rules changed midway through the run. Why did Lucasfilm let an official Star Wars comic publish stories that openly contradicted everything else? Who decided which stories counted and which ones did not? And what happens to the meaning of those stories when, in 2014, the entire Expanded Universe that once housed them was declared non-canon anyway?

• 2. The Anthology Format

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  Each issue of Star Wars Tales held a few unrelated stories from various eras of the Star Wars timeline, packaged together in a standardized 64-page format. The series collected its 24 issues into six trade paperbacks, each comprising four issues. That structure made it unlike almost any other ongoing Star Wars comic of its era: there was no serialized protagonist, no cliffhanger threading from one issue to the next, and no expectation that a reader needed to have followed the previous installment. A single issue might open with a story set 245 years before the Battle of Yavin and close with one set 22 years after it. Writers ranged from comics veterans like John Ostrander and Garth Ennis to novelists like Timothy Zahn, who contributed a Mara Jade story in Issue #1. Artists worked in styles that could shift dramatically from story to story within the same issue, from the spare cartooning of Tony Millionaire's two-page Hoth story to the dense superhero rendering of Claudio Castellini on the Darth Vader: Extinction two-parter that opened and continued across Issues #1 and #2.

• 3. The Canon Problem

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  From Issues #1 through #20, every story in Star Wars Tales was retroactively labelled "Infinities," placing it outside the official Star Wars canon. Then something shifted. Beginning with Issue #21, the series switched its default position: stories were now considered within continuity unless explicitly labelled otherwise. That boundary meant the first twenty issues, covering five years of publication, sat permanently outside the timeline that the rest of the Expanded Universe recognized. The Expanded Universe itself then ceased to matter in 2014, when Lucasfilm declared the entirety of it non-canon. References to the Star Wars Tales stories had been woven into the Expanded Universe over the years, but that network of cross-references dissolved along with everything else. The series had started outside the official story, briefly moved inside it, and then watched the definition of "official story" evaporate entirely.

• 4. The Humorous and the Absurd

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  Peter David's Skippy the Jedi Droid, an 8-page story in Issue #1 set at the Battle of Yavin, represents one end of the tonal spectrum the series deliberately embraced. Kevin Rubio's Force Fiction, in Issue #7, placed Mace Windu and Yoda in a fast food restaurant debating whether to train Anakin Skywalker, with Yoda using mind control on a waitress to avoid paying the bill, before Supreme Chancellor Palpatine arrived to offer his own opinion. Rubio returned in Issue #4 with A Death Star is Born, in which Moff Wilhuff Tarkin, Tol Sivron, and Bevel Lemelisk presented the Death Star proposal to Emperor Palpatine, with the story's visual jokes including an Imperial insignia drawn to resemble Mickey Mouse ears, a Bob's Big Boy statue, a hologram of Yogi Bear, and a starship from Star Trek. The appearance of Bevel Lemelisk in that story was deliberately drawn differently from every other portrayal of the character, for reasons the source notes were never explained. Tony Millionaire contributed George R. Binks in Issue #20, a 10-page story set 45 years before the Battle of Yavin following Jar Jar Binks's father, a whaler whose son's catastrophic clumsiness marooned the family on a deserted island and eventually drove the father to a failed suicide attempt.

• 5. Darkness Between the Jokes

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  Jason Hall's Dark Journey, a 12-page story in Issue #17, follows a Jedi named Vydel Dir'Nul who has gone rogue during the Clone Wars, hunting a serial killer called Kardem who uses a lightsaber and Force lightning. The story ends with the revelation that Dir'Nul is Kardem: she discovered her lover Ash B'risko with another woman, killed him in a rage, and then fragmented her identity so that one persona hunted a killer the other persona kept creating. In Issue #19, Into the Great Unknown by Haden Blackman placed Han Solo and Chewbacca crashing the Millennium Falcon on Earth's Pacific Northwest after a blind hyperspace jump, with Han killed by Native Americans and the mourning Chewbacca living in the trees as a figure the locals identified as a sasquatch. One hundred and twenty-six years later, archaeologist Indiana Jones and his sidekick Short Round discovered the wreck and Han's remains, with Jones deciding to leave them undisturbed. The story was labelled non-canon. Rob Williams's W. Haden Blackman-credited Revenants in Issue #18 was set months after Chewbacca's death in the broader Expanded Universe, with Han Solo being hunted across a junkyard moon before learning the entire pursuit was a training exercise run by Boba Fett to select recruits for the Yuuzhan Vong, who were paying the Mandalorians more than anyone else.

• 6. Origin Stories and Backstories

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  Haden Blackman's Stones in Issue #13 told a young Mace Windu story set 58 years before the Battle of Yavin, sent to the planet Hurikane to negotiate for crystals. When events went poorly and Windu panicked, pushing a native being into a canyon, he reversed course and used the Force to piece the broken body back together. The being, in gratitude, gave Windu some of the Hurrikaine crystals from its own body, which Windu then used to construct his distinctive purple lightsaber blade. In Issue #24, Rob Williams's Marked revealed that the elaborate Sith tattoos covering Darth Maul were applied by Darth Sidious himself, with childhood flashbacks showing Maul originally had plain red skin. Christian Read's Nameless in Issue #10 told the story of how Maul came to build his double-bladed lightsaber, framed as a confession to Darth Sidious: Maul had been ordered to kill Jedi Master Siolo Ur Manka and was defeated using only a wooden staff, then rebuilt himself and returned with the new weapon, stabbing Manka through the back with its second blade. When Sidious suggested naming the weapon, Maul refused, preferring it remain an anonymous instrument of murder. Dean Motter's Yaddle's Tale: The One Below in Issue #5 explained how the Jedi Master Yaddle spent roughly a century imprisoned in a pit on the planet Koba after a mission went wrong 245 years before the Battle of Yavin, surviving on food lowered by wardens who eventually forgot why they performed the ritual, until an earthquake freed her.

• 7. The Storyteller Frame

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  Issue #19 closed with Jason Hall's Storyteller, a story set long after the Battle of Yavin in a world where an enslaved race's oppressors, called the Vindar, have erased their history. Two brothers, Otalp and Remoh, seek out a legendary figure called the Oracle and find a deteriorating protocol droid in a cave, still retelling the story of a boy from a desolate planet who redeemed a darkened soul and freed his galaxy using a lightsaber. The droid's vocabulary has partially decayed: he uses words like "Ar-Too" and "Master Luke" that the brothers cannot understand. When the Vindar arrive and kill both the droid and Otalp, the surviving brother Remoh finds a metal rod protruding from the droid's severed chest and discovers a button. A green blade appears. The story's final image is Remoh beginning to think of how to free his own world. The story closed the run of non-canon issues and directly preceded Issue #21, the point at which Star Wars Tales began placing its stories within continuity.