Tales of the Jedi (comics)

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi arrived from Dark Horse Comics in 1993 and asked a question almost no one had thought to ask before: what did a galaxy far, far away look like thousands of years before the Skywalkers? The answer stretched across six interconnected story arcs and a sequel, running until 1998. At its core, the series covered two cataclysmic conflicts: the Great Sith War, set roughly four thousand years before the Battle of Yavin, and the Great Hyperspace War, which took place a full thousand years before that. For a time, these were the earliest Star Wars stories ever told. What drove fallen Jedi to the dark side? How did the ancient Sith Empire rise, collapse, and leave its ruins across the galaxy? And who were the men and women who fought and sometimes lost that war? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Ancient Sith Empire

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  Marka Ragnos died, and in the middle of his funeral procession on Korriban, the Sith graveyard world, two hyperspace explorers named Gav and Jori Daragon accidentally crash-landed. Their arrival interrupted a succession dispute between rival Sith Lords Naga Sadow and Ludo Kressh. Sadow saw opportunity where Kressh saw threat. He freed the Daragons, killed his own mentor Simus to hide his involvement, and planted a Republic blaster to make the rescue look like an outside attack. The gambit worked. Sadow maneuvered himself into the title of Dark Lord of the Sith and pressed for war with the Republic. He sent Jori back to Republic space with a tracking beacon secretly hidden on her ship, the Starbreaker 12, giving him the coordinates he needed to invade. Gav eventually turned against Sadow during the battle, transmitting the coordinates to Korriban to Empress Teta's forces. It cost him his life.

• 3. The Fall of Naga Sadow

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  Above the red supergiant Primus Goluud, Sadow used a superweapon attached to his flagship to trigger solar flares, forcing both fleets to scatter. During the Battle of Coruscant, Sadow meditating in his sphere above Primus Goluud projected illusions that made his army appear far larger than it truly was. When Gav Daragon fired on that sphere and broke Sadow's concentration, the illusory forces faded and the Republic's defenders found renewed resolve. Ludo Kressh had meanwhile declared himself the new Dark Lord and was waiting when Sadow's battered fleet arrived back at Korriban. Sadow ended the standoff by crashing one of his own ships into Kressh's flagship. Then Empress Teta's forces arrived, having followed using Gav's coordinates. Trapped between two enemies, Sadow ordered his Massassi warriors to kill their own commanders, creating a wall of drifting ships that screened his escape. He fled to Yavin IV with a single ship, and built vast temples there using Massassi labor.

• 4. Freedon Nadd and the Curse of Onderon

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  Six hundred years after Naga Sadow settled on Yavin IV, a fallen Jedi named Freedon Nadd arrived on the same world and learned Sith sorcery from Sadow's spirit. Nadd carried that knowledge and Sadow's treasures to the planet Onderon, installed himself as king, and his spirit kept advising his descendants long after his body was gone. When the Republic sent Jedi Ulic Qel-Droma to mediate a conflict on Onderon, Nadd's ghost met him and told him he would one day become a Sith Lord. The dark side cult known as the Krath made that prophecy self-fulfilling: they attacked the Republic, wounded Ulic with alchemically treated shrapnel, and injected him with dark side poisons. The two-part story arc called The Freedon Nadd Uprising, written by Tom Veitch in 1994, shows the violence that erupted when Jedi Knights attempted to move Nadd's sarcophagus to the moon of Dxun. Hundreds of Naddist cultists swarmed up from underground, Jedi Master Arca Jeth was captured by King Ommin, and the young Krath heirs Satal and Aleema Keto arrived on Onderon by crash-landing their ship, the Krath Enchanter, looking for the secrets of a stolen Sith book.

• 5. Exar Kun and the Great Sith War

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  Exar Kun left his master Vodo-Siosk Baas because Baas refused to teach him about the dark side. On Korriban, the spirit of Freedon Nadd tricked Kun into accepting it, and on Yavin IV, Nadd gave him a stark ultimatum: surrender to the dark side or die. Kun chose life, and then destroyed Nadd with a dark side amulet. When Kun and the already-corrupted Ulic Qel-Droma clashed on Cinnagar, the ghost of Marka Ragnos interrupted their duel and declared Kun the Dark Lord of the Sith, naming Qel-Droma his apprentice. The two Sith Lords raided the Jedi world of Ossus to steal students, recruited the Mandalorian warriors after Qel-Droma defeated Lord Mandalore in single combat, and attacked Coruscant. During Kun's rescue of the captured Qel-Droma, he killed his own former master Vodo-Siosk Baas. The war ended not with a final battlefield victory but with something more personal: Ulic cut down his own brother Cay in a lightsaber duel, and in his horror surrendered to his former lover Nomi Sunrider, who severed his connection to the Force permanently. Kun, cornered on Yavin IV, performed a ritual that drained the life force from every Massassi on the planet to detach his spirit from his body and bind it to his temple.

• 6. Redemption and Its Costs

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  Ten years after Exar Kun's ritual on Yavin IV, the sequel arc Redemption followed the scattered survivors. Ulic Qel-Droma, stripped of the Force, drifted through the galaxy with a pilot named Hoggon and eventually settled on the icy world of Rhen Var. On the remote station called Exis, Jedi Masters had convened a Great Jedi Convocation. Nomi Sunrider's daughter Vima, now a teenager, chafed at her mother's refusal to train her. A Cathar Jedi named Sylvar publicly named Ulic as the greatest shame of the Jedi Knights during the convocation, citing the death of her mate Crado among Ulic's crimes. Vima stowed away on Hoggon's ship and traveled to Rhen Var alone, declaring she would not leave until she became a Jedi. Meanwhile Tott Doneeta, bearing burns from a heat storm on Ryloth, tried to guide Sylvar away from her own consuming anger. The arc closes on that double image: Ulic, learning to live without the Force, and Vima, determined to reclaim what her generation nearly lost.

• 7. Legacy Beyond the Page

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  West End Games produced a role-playing game sourcebook tied to the first three arcs of the series. Kevin J. Anderson carried Exar Kun forward into his 1994 tie-in novel Star Wars: Dark Apprentice, where Kun's ghost haunted Luke Skywalker's new Jedi Academy. Writer Tom Veitch reused his Tales of the Jedi character Ood Bnar in Dark Empire II. The planet Ossus, first introduced in The Freedon Nadd Uprising, was later established in the 2022 canon novel Shadow of the Sith as the site of Luke Skywalker's Jedi temple, a location depicted in a 2022 episode of The Book of Boba Fett. Exar Kun entered the Disney-era canon through promotional materials linked to the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story. The novelization of The Rise of Skywalker even references Ommin by name. BioWare's games set in the Knights of the Old Republic era drew repeatedly on the events and characters from Tales of the Jedi, though those games, like the comics themselves, are no longer part of the official Star Wars canon. The Dawn of the Jedi comics eventually pushed the timeline further back, ending Tales of the Jedi's long run as the earliest chapter in the Star Wars story.