Star Wars Comics History: Wars on Infinite Galaxies Part One: A New Hope?

“If you will not turn to the Dark side, then perhaps she will!”-Darth Vader, ROTJ.

 

For years, Marvel and DC ran several comics that asked “What if?” certain things happened to their characters-funny thing is, some of the stuff later happened…as Spider-Man fans know well.

 

 

However, in the early 21st century, Dark Horse threw their hat into the ring, with Star Wars: Infinities.

 

The storyline began with Luke’s torpedo’s at the end of “A new Hope” malfunctioning, damaging, but not destroying, the Death Star, allowing the rebels at least some time to escape-however, while Han and Luke are able to flee in time, Leia and the Alliance command are re-captured. Vader begins to sense some force stuff with Leia, so he sends her to Coruscant, and trains her in the dark side along with the Emperor. Meanwhile, Luke, Han and Chewie manage to evade capture, and Luke begins his training with Yoda a bit earlier…

 

Half a decade passes, the Empire is more powerful than ever and Leia is now a Dark Jedi and an Imperial true believer. The Death Star is now called “The Justice Star” as well.

I’m reminded somewhat of this “Simpsons” quote.

Luke-who by now has completed his training (Which I guess took far longer in this reality) learns the truth about his father and sister from Yoda, and the group-including Yoda-decide to pay the Emperor a visit on Coruscant, which now has a Death Star around it and what looks like a ton of Super Star Destroyers.

 

What follows is Return of the Jedi to the power of eleven, with Luke battling Leia-and eventually redeeming her-which in turn redeems Vader when the Emperor tries to kill them both with force lightning, and with Yoda Jedi mind-tricking Tarkin into giving him control of the Death…”Justice” Star, which he then crashes on top of the Emperor on Coruscant, killing him and R2-D2 in the process (Although R2’s memories are saved and put into a new body, and Yoda still becomes a ghost).

 

“Infinities”, while a bit goofy, is still an entertaining experiment. The same treatment would later be applied to ESB (With Luke dying on Hoth) and ROTJ (With the Jabba rescue being badly botched), and for a while “Infinities” would be considered a catch-all for explicity-non canon Star Wars (Before “Legends”), which at the time included many elements of  the “Star Wars tales” anthology series. I’ll cover those in a later article.

The weirdness wouldn’t end here, either….as “Vader the White” here demonstrates.

 

 

Star Wars comics history-The wedding of Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade

Some spoilers below for the New Jedi Order/Dark Nest/Legacy of the Force novels.

In the 1999 “Hand of Thrawn” duology, Luke Skywalker proposed Marriage to Mara Jade, a former member of the Emperor’s Hand, a force-sensitive operative turned smuggler who originally wanted to kill Luke for depriving her of her Master (who she believed had a greater role in his death than he actually did). She first appeared in the novel “Heir to The Empire”, and proved popular with fans of the novels, and appeared in several of the sequel novels.

The HOTT also was Bantam’s swan song for their publishing of the franchise, with new publisher Del Rey announcing a shift. Instead of mainly publishing standalones and trilogies like Bantam did (although that’s largely what they’re doing these days), they would start out with an ambitious 20 part novel series, “The New Jedi Order”.

In-between this, Dark Horse set a new limited series, “Union”, which would chronicle the marriage.

The series is mainly goofy fun, with both Luke and Mara’s parties-made of both movie and original EU creations (including several by Michael Stackpole, who wrote the series) preparing for the wedding, including selecting dresses, spa-days, jitters….

and of course, bachelor parties!

Luke and Mara get two ceremonies, one a Jedi one (This is before AOTC firmly established Jedi didn’t get married, but since the Jedi Order in the EU at this point was a bit different than the old, it’s an easy thing to explain-and sort of is in the bottom panel here)

and a civil one:

Which is nearly crashed by former Imperials, because naturally it’s not Star Wars without a little bit of war in it:

But it all ends happily, at least for now. Luke and Mara eventually have many happy years together, and she gives birth to a son, although they still have to deal with the Yuzzhan Vong threat, and a few other bad guys. Unfortunately, Mara is unfortunately killed in the novel “Sacrifice”, part of the Legacy of the Force series.

However, Mara would soon be pretty much wiped from canon all together, sort of similar to another marriage made in comics with another redhead with the initials MJ: 

…..But I won’t get into that now, and at least it’s because Disney wanted a clean slate for the sequel trilogy and didn’t involve any deals with the semi-Devil.

However, there’s still a bit of hope that some version of Mara still exists in Disney’s ‘new’ canon, as we’ve seen other EU characters-including those like Thrawn, be reintegrated into the series although in a different way. Plus there’s still a bit gap between Star Wars Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, where Luke is shown alone and self-exiled. So maybe Luke did marry someone, possibly a version of Mara Jade, in the new timeline. However, we’ll have to wait until this to find out, maybe: