The End of Dark Horse

As was predicted since the acquisition of Star Wars by Disney, Marvel is now going to be the helm of all comic books Star Wars starting in 2015. Dark Horse will be allowed to end it's current wave of comic books this year, and as stated by Big Shiny Robot, it is currently unclear if Disney will purchase the rights to reprint the comics made by Dark Horse.

Many fans were seemingly upset about the whole thing, despite the fact that it was something almost everyone saw coming (including myself). Personally, it's something that doesn't really affect me as a fan.

For starters, I never grew up reading comic books, and I was never really around them. Part of it has to do with my lack of interest in superheroes, but it also stems from the fact that Dark Horse failed to impress me as far as Star Wars is concerned. Not only because of the crappy storylines that were utterly predictable, boring and a 100% ignorance of the mythology of Star Wars (I'm looking right at you, Dark Empire and Legacy!) but also because the artwork was largely devoid of any resemblance to the characters of the films.

Of course, I'm the first to admit that I haven't seen everything these guys made with Star Wars, so there might be a few gems I'm not really aware of. One of the few things that Dark Horse published and that I have to say they've done a magnificent job with is the adaptation of George Lucas's first rough draft of Star Wars. Mike Mayhew's artwork is absolutely fantastic, and I think that they've really captured the essential origins of Star Wars before it even turned into a film.

However, before Dark Horse steps away from producing comics for Lucasfilm, they will produce a 4 part adaptation of what would have been the final Darth Maul arc of the Clone Wars. The series will be titled Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir and will likely end the arc of the character, once and for all. I still think that the fans should petition to see this adapted to the screen someday. Let's revive the Save the Clone Wars campaign folks!

We can conclude the end of Dark Horse by saying that the future of Star Wars comics remains uncertain (I've heard many complain about Marvel but like I said, I have little knowledge into anything superhero-related). But we can also be optimistic because the stories that will be adapted into comics will likely come from the Lucasfilm Story Group (more on that in a later post), so it's possible that we won't see weak stories developed into comics in the future.