50 Years Later, Star Wars Is Finally Doing The One Thing It Could Have Done All Along
Could this have happened in the 1970s?
Obviously, Marvel is famous for its huge range of comic book heroes, but it’s also, for a very long time, been the home of comic book adaptations of big TV and movie properties. Marvel was the official comic book home of The Transformers from 1984 through the early 90s; they published Star Trek comics from the late 70s to the early 80s and also in the late 90s. And the late 70s even saw them release comics based on Doctor Who. Even now, after the Disney/Fox acquisition, Marvel publishes comics based on beloved IPs they didn’t create – including recent series within the Alien and Predator franchises.
But the biggest Golden Goose Marvel has ever held the comic rights to is undoubtedly Star Wars. For ten years starting in 1977, Marvel Comics published over 100 issues of a Star Wars series that included adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. For the past decade or so, Marvel has been publishing in-canon new Star Wars stories, but back in April 1977, a full month before Star Wars hit theaters, Marvel’s adaptation gave the world some of the first images of the famous faraway galaxy heroes and villains. And yet, despite other Marvel properties crossing over in the 1970s and 1980s (Spider-Man hung out with the Transformers in the pages of Marvel comics), there’s never been a crossover between Marvel Comics characters and Star Wars characters. That is, until now.
50 years later, Star Wars and Marvel are finally doing something that, in theory, could have been done a long time ago.
2027 will see the publication of the first ever Star Wars/Marvel Universe crossover.
Star Wars x Marvel comics crossover, explained
On August 11, Entertainment Weekly announced that for the first time ever, the universes of Star Wars and Marvel will collide in a five-part miniseries entitled “Hope Assembles.” Written by longtime comic book veteran Kevin Smith (responsible for a quintessential 90s Daredevil run) and illustrated by Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man artist David Marquez, the crossover will launch in January of 2027 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars in 1977. The series will be released monthly, with the fifth and final issue dropping in May 2027.
Plot details are still relatively light, but one of the more interesting aspects of the announcement is the fact that it will apparently be a retelling of A New Hope set in Marvel’s mainline 616 universe, the result of a “reality-shattering spell,” according to the comic’s logline.
If the art released by Marvel is any indication of what the book has in store, then it’ll involve characters such as Spider-Man, Black Panther, the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the X-Men, along with iconic Original Trilogy characters like Luke, Leia, and Han – there’s even a suggestion that Darth Vader might end up allied with Thanos and Doctor Doom, surely to capitalize on the synergy that will inevitably come with the release of Avengers: Doomsday. Marvel Comics has held its current Star Wars comic licensing for over ten years now, and while plenty of the comics they’ve released under the Star Wars banner have been great, Hope Assembles definitely promises to be one of the more memorable things they’ve done with the property on the page so far.
The Star Wars x DC crossover that never was
Could we ever get this?
Oddly enough, although most fans associate Star Wars comics with Marvel (or Dark Horse Comics in the 90s), there was, at one point in the late 2000s, a plan for a crossover between DC superheroes like Superman and the world of Star Wars. Specifically, comics veterans Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross worked on a concept that would have seen Superman fight Darth Vader.
The project ultimately fell apart because of various licensing issues and payment agreements. By 2012, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, and by early 2015, Marvel was back in the Star Wars business.
For being a world and style so connected to the world of comic books, it’s interesting we’ve not gotten a big superhero Star Wars comic book event until now. Here’s hoping that Hope Assembles was worth the wait.
