Lit The 181st Imperial Discussion Group: Dark Empire!

Dark news everyone! The 181st Imperial Discussion Group ends another year. We've had our first look at comic books, we've had excellent audio drama dramatizations, we've had the First Exar Kun Appreciation Extravaganza, we've had our fifth birthday, and thanks to our fifth birthday, we had Corran Horn! Isn't he marvellous. That guy.

Due to popular demand (well, everything we do in here is due to popular demand, even if the population consists of only two people), we close the year with another look on the vast realm of comic books. Our focus is the comic book which is arguably the first real EU comic book, because c'mon, the old stuff didn't count back then. Its position in the timeline, its plot and its choice of characters have helped it remain an important part of the standard EU curriculum instead of just one of those comic books.

Yes, we've all known I'm talking about Dark Empire by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy ever since the thread title. And yes, we'll continue with the second and third part later this month.

- When did you find out about Dark Empire? Were you there when EU was forged out of Zahn's books and this graphic excursion? Did you only join in on the fun because of the comic books? Or were you late to the game, eventually checking out that old thing with the unusual visuals because everyone around here says it's important?

- Comic books vs. novels... There's constant demand for a novel adapting this story, preferrably by preferred authors of the respective time when the demand is voiced. If we had a (good) novel of Dark Empire, do you think that the comic book would eventually sink into obscurity? Would a book actually stand a chance of fighting uphill against feelings of "we already know the story from the comic book, why publish it again?" Would an "I, Jedi" style story, retelling the timeframe from a fan favourite angle like Rogue Squadron and Corran fighting against the Dark Empire's forces?

- Would you agree that this comic book is special in that it's an essential moment in the main timeline? Other comic works including Luke and his friends never seem to have the immediacy, the importance of whatever DR throws at the timeline. The Clone Wars comic books had a promise of standing on one level with the movie experience (and yeah, we know how that turned out, but stay with me). But other than that, stories produced by DH always seem to look for a niche (following TOTJ's lead), and as much impact as they have, they have pretty little impact on the main plot line extrapolated from the movie saga (with the notable exception of Legacy). As much as TOTJ opened up the EU for the idea of other eras years before TPM would actually establish an era without Luke Skywalker on the non-EU level of things - did it also help sidetrack the comic books from a more prominent spot? Not fighting for the heavy events featuring the big three anymore, but rather creating a lot of stuff that may seem a bit apocryphal for those trying to get into the basic timeline these days? There might also be a LFL decision in this somewhere, sidetracking the comic books no matter what DH wanted, but still - how many "unimportant" novels were produced in comparison to "unimportant" comic books, and also videogames (since you only ever got cameos from the movie characters, but never interferred with their stories in games like Jedi Knight, Rebel Assault, and X-Wing)?

- In addition, there's controversy about Dark Empire since it apparently negates Anakin Skywalker's sacrifice - he didn't kill the Emperor, his journey in the movie saga led to nothing. Seeing how this concept directly flies in the face of the entire Episode 3 idea that the movies are only about Anakin's journey, isn't it interesting that Episode 3 actually seems to borrow a few ideas from Dark Empire, the original Lucas-approved favourite EU work?

Next month, we'll have a look at the other time Luke and Palpatine clashed - Return of the Jedi by James Kahn. Even if that story might have lost some of its importance ever since Dark Empire's release.

 

Dark Empire has its supporters and its detractors, and I love reading the opinions of both, but if there's one thing I can't stand in a Dark Empire discussion, it's the call for a novelization. There's really no grounds for it, and it always seems to be borne from a novel-centric view of the post-ROTJ timeline that seeks to dismiss comics as a valid medium. "It's a major story set in the New Republic era, and how dare they deny it to us in novel form!" It's perfectly alright for the traditional stranglehold that novels have on the New Republic era to be broken; comics are a fantastic medium for SW stories that needn't be barred from any single era. Star Wars is traditionally very visual, and say what you will about Cam Kennedy's greens and purples, but Dark Empire gave us some stunning visuals that no novel would ever be able to do. It created new planets, weapons, characters, and vehicles that have stuck in readers' memories far more than a lot of image-less words on a page ever have.

If there's some missing story from Dark Empire, it's not because it was written in comic form. It's because it was written concurrently with Heir to the Empire and only belatedly pushed six years ahead in the timeline at the last minute. The Dark Empire Sourcebook took care of the meshing and the expanding, and we don't need a novel to do it again. We know what Rogue Squadron was up to. We know what Bel Iblis was up to. Would it be cool to read an actual story about what they did? Sure, but you could realistically expand any post-ROTJ novel. What were the Rogues and Garm up to during the Black Fleet Crisis? It needs a comic adaptation!!!

I often wish that the novels' stranglehold on the continuing post-ROTJ era would be broken more often. Especially after the cosmic failures that were LOTF and FOTJ. If the post-FOTJ storyline were placed solely in the hands of John & Jan in a monthly comic series... imagine how much better things would be.

 

Haunted, shirtless men, women in tight clothes, lots of Huttese cursing, and everyone holding their lightsaber the wrong way?

 

I do think Jeff's onto something though - people seem quite happy with SW as a multimedia when mujltimedia means films and books, they might just about put up with CDs and video games, but comics? Star Wars is asking people to read comics? Aren't they for kids? Then there's the statements that crop up like bad pennies about what is an entire medium of entertainment: They're not like novels, or the last one was awful so I'm never reading another comic ever again! So you do that on film, TV and books too? All that's by the by though as DE's greatest crime is clearly telling a high-profile story as a comic! How dare they?

It's interesting too to consider the impact of the prequels which is double-edged for DE. On the one hand, the mystery of who Anakin was no longer works as well, we know he wasn't all that a good a guy, instead being someone on the dark side railway and it was only a question of when and not if he goes off the rails! On the other hand, it has Luke deck the hell out of Sidious, which goes up as an achievement in light of ROTS. That Luke does it with Leia's help casts an intriguing light on Sidious' extensive efforts to isolate Anakin in ROTS too.

Finally it's interesting to consider DE as an example of how no one really believes in heroes any more, that the idea of enjoying a mythical tale of the hero descending into the underworld, overcoming various trials and then returning mostly intact seems gone. Instead strange notions that a hero can't possibly lie to a villain or that he must have had to do some evil in what is a very short timespan for a story do the rounds. The reason is DE is quite upfront that Luke's attempting an inside job on the dark side and Sidious knows it, but people seem to think there must be more to it, that it can't be this simple. Well it is, they've only got 6 issues and about 120 pages to tell the story, there's no space for anything more - that's what you have the Republic and Legacy comics for!

 

I want to single this out for a second... because I don't think that it's necessarily true for Star Wars fans. I think this distinction is more important for (some) EU fans. But generally, as a movie/video game/pop culture reference/animation show/LEGO franchise, comic books are natural. Novels, especially when they demand that you've read 50 previous novels, not so much.

 

I don't think Dark Empire sullies Anakin's story at all. In the end he does redeem himself and destroy the Sith. It just happens that they return again. Anakin's story is centered around him, not Palpatine. It does (not particularly well) create that Legacy feeling of the son following in the footsteps of the father.

 

I would be lying if I didn't say I finally got around to obtaining and reading the Dark Empire Trilogy just last year for its importance. I am more of a novel person than anything else, so when I found out that DE was a comic after being slightly confused in the JAT, I definitely wanted and still want a novelization, for numerous reasons. The Dark Empire Trilogy was my first comic, though the Clone Wars comics are definitely of interest to me, and I got Serenity: Those Left Behind in addition to TERC for my birthday from my brother and his wife, so I suspect more comics are in my future. Don't get me wrong, I am all for the novel stranglehold on the New Republic era being broken, especially with the post-NJO disaster, but there is nothing quite like RotS novelization and what it adds to RotS, which makes someone like Stover the perfect candidate for creating something truly specially with the story of DE.

On a side note, I seriously doubt anyone, whether it be my favorite authors or John and Jan, which I haven't actually read any of their work, though I am interested in both Legacy and DotJ, could fix the post-NJO without a complete rewrite, because I hate it and every plot point happens in it that much.

 

Oh I'd agree it's not a categorical point Grey, nonetheless, it does seem to crop up a lot. It's especially puzzling to me now as comics are more prevalent and accepted than they have been previously.

 

I've read only the first Dark Empire, and...I didn't like it (I know many do here, so don't kill me ). I don't think it's terrible, but I just don't find it that interesting and even less original (the Emperor comes back - the writers didn't bother to make another villain; those super weapons (I forgot their names) were kinda cheesy to me; Luke turns to the dark side - I somehow don't like that that much, but it may be just me; etc...). However I do realize it's importance in the EU, and that without it we wouldn't have SW as we do now. It's relevance is also now questionable, since we don't know if it will remain cannon with the ST coming.

Again, only my opinion

 

I first heard of Dark Empire when I was reading the JAT which I thought (at the time) was a sequel to TTT, and while it referenced TTT it also went on about reborn Emperor, and Luke turning to the Darkside and I was thinking whaaattt ??

When I finaly got round to reading it, I thought (leaving aside Anakin's journey) it completely negated Luke's own journey and refusal to turn to the darkside in RTJ.

Also the story on it's own with the other characters seems rather pointless and Boba Fett showing up and chasing them for no real reason (besides giving the OT characters something to do) other than he is popular with fanboys so the writer thought it would be a good idea to insert him in the story.

Also I was not impressed with the Artwork either which until the Baron Fel comics I have felt was substandard in most Stawars comics.

All in all a poor story which I was quite happy to see Zahn trash in HoT.

 

Must be about the only time you approved of Zahn doing anything then!

 

As I have stated previously (1000 times ?) I have no complaints about TTT and thought it was excellent so I approved of that.

 

Clearly you don't do comedy.

 

I'll step right into the crosshair and say that I basically love the artwork. The characters could look more like the people who portrayed them in the movies (and extrapolating worse and worse 80s hairdos on our heroes we last saw in the early 80s isn't exactly good design either), but I love the way the thing is coloured. I love that this isn't just trying to look realistic and that's that. This here is really working with moods. I think the love-it-or-hate-it nature of the art really makes it art.

Also - World Devastators. Should those really be considered super weapons?

 

I definitely agree with this. Most claims of Dark Empire negating Luke's journey that I've seen are based not on what actually happens within DE's pages, but rather on little more than the idea of Luke falling to the dark side. Like you said, it's actually pretty simple: Luke pledges himself to Palpatine in order to attempt an inside job. As the archetype goes, he falls a little too far and needs to be pulled back from the edge by those closest to him. It's a SW take on a classic myth, and it's not the only one --- Ulic has the exact same story. Luke falling a little too far is also the perfect setup for Leia playing the redemptive role that he played in ROTJ and finding her path to the Force. That we didn't get a followup on Leia-as-a-Jedi until Dark Nest is criminal.

Luke barely just falls over the edge, and applying quotation marks to the word "dark" when discussing his "dark" turn may even be appropriate. While hanging out on Byss, he spends the whole time making contingency plans to screw Palpy over --- that is, putting the World Devastator shutdown codes into Artoo.

I'll be honest: I'm quite fond of Dark Empire. As overused as the word "epic" is, I'll still assert that DE is an epic story. A lot of the New Republic era features pretty low-key stories --- even Zahn's trilogy has a severely weakened Empire that doesn't start a blitz campaign until it acquires the Katana dreadnaughts at the end of Book 2 --- but DE has an Imperial Civil War inflicting devastating damage on the galaxy, superweapons that are big enough to be threatening but not so big to be silly (just talking about DEI here; DEII is a different story), and a test for the hero that hasn't been topped in any other post-ROTJ work. Don't get me wrong --- low-key stories are good, and the NR era would be awful if every work tried to top every other one --- but Dark Empire is just the story that the era needs to balance out the rest of the low-keyness. It's storytelling on a grand scale; it's the good guys fighting for their very existence; it's something to break the monotony of the NR era being warlord-cleanup after warlord-cleanup. It's wonderful.

DE also really makes an effort to expand the universe --- it gives us new and memorable locations like Nar Shaddaa and Byss, and new and memorable vehicles like the TIE Crawler and the World Devastator. It was the first story to give Wedge a command role outside of the cockpit. It began to delve into the history of the Jedi. It's truly great world-building.

DE also utilizes Threepio and Artoo in a classic-feeling and useful way that few novels have matched, and makes great use of the criminal underworld. It includes all the elements of a great SW story. The only question is, then, did all of those elements come together to form a successful whole? I think they did. Things started to get a bit ridiculous in DEII, but those original six issues are some of the EU's most memorable.

 

Speaking as someone who has never been particularly enraptured by the calls for a novelization, I do think there is some point to a novelization beyond simple mediumism. Dark Empire is, as you point out, an epic story, but it's one without a great deal of pagetime or internality due to its medium. There's room for a lot more going on around the story, and a lot of potential in seeing into the heads of the people involved. There's also the fact that we now know so much more, and would love to see the Emperor's POV, or what the Wedge we now know from Allston and Stackpole was thinking. Etc., etc. I think it is a situation that lends itself uniquely to a case for a bigger look at it in a different medium with the perspective of time. I mean, you don't tend to see calls for novelizations of TOTJ or CE, and I'd say that's a comparable level of "important story told via comics."

Now, I actually don't think straight novelization is the way to go -- because, as you point out, a lot of the demand may just be mediumism, and DE told its story and is perfectly capable of standing on its own. But I do confess to a lingering interest in tie-in novels. A novel about Ackbar out on the front lines, fighting off the resurgent Empire (or, for that matter, a comic about it) would be an interesting way of revisiting the era and telling more story and making whatever connections without stepping on DE's toes. Or even something like a novel strictly focused on the Emperor and Luke and their struggle back and forth, and the intrigue behind the scenes that comes into play with CE. Something that's not just retelling or remaking DE, but revisiting the era to tell different stories or a different specific angle on the story -- like Invasion for the NJO or Death Star for ANH.

 

Yeah, I could get behind tie-in novels. But like you said, that's a completely different tree to be barking up. The 5 - 7 ABE era of Dark Empire is pretty much an era all of its own, and adding something akin to Invasion to that era wouldn't be the same as adding something akin to Heir to the Empire: The Comic Adaptation. For example, Retreat from Coruscant is a cool story that builds on and adds to Dark Empire, and more short stories in that vein would be great. A flat-out novelization? Not so much.

As for why we don't see calls for novelizations of TOTJ or CE, that has everything to do with DE being a post-ROTJ continuing story of the big three, whereas TOTJ and CE are not. Crimson Empire is a post-ROTJ story that tells the very important final fall of the Empire, but it doesn't involve the main cast and therefore doesn't rank nearly as high up as Dark Empire in most fans' importance scale. The calls for a DE novelization that I've seen have always been for a straightup adaptation, mostly due to a novelcentric ire stemming from a post-ROTJ big three continuing story having been denied to them in novel form. Tie-in novels? Go for it. But you're absolutely right in that DE told its story and is perfectly capable of standing on its own.

DE may lend itself well to a case for a bigger and expanded look at its picture, but I don't think it's actually all that unique in that regard. A lot of older material could fall under that umbrella --- the Nagai-Tof war has really benefited from the bigger look at the conflict offered by The Forgotten War and sourcebooks like the Atlas; ditto the Great Hyperspace War and the Sith War. All of those were comic stories that maybe could have used a few more issues, and all of them have been expanded in source material and/or tie-in fiction. I don't really see their cases as all that different from Dark Empire's.

 

He also spends a lot of that time Learning The Secrets of the Dark Side from Palpy- as the endnotes make clear.

And there's hints in TDESB, that he may have created some Imperial Sentinels- at least, he calls them "my sentinels" - and creating them is supposed to be a test for Dark Side Adepts:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Sentinel

 

I first read DE quite recently - after the prequels came out and EU was expanded significantly, so that's probably why I don't feel for it. By that time I already had a strong vision of the SW universe, how it's supposed to work, and where's what in the timeline. And it's not surprising that DE did not fit into this vision. (I'm talking about all DE arcs here, since I don't remember where one starts and another ends).

Palpatine reborn clearly does not fit with the modern representation of him. In recent work - prequels, RotJ, Plagueis, many Clone Wars novels - Palpatine is shown to have such an incredible cunning and charisma that he makes you tremble and stare in awe each time you see him in action. In DE he's more of a generic galaxy-conquering Sith, if very powerful. He'd be much more suited in the TotJ times. By the way, similarity to KJA's Sith era comics is obvious, but they work better because they're using fresh timeline and characters which don't have to fit anywhere.

Also, there's the cheesiness of it. All those superweapons of the day, darksiders of the day - are a bit too much. The storyline was epic, but became in my opinion too much epic. In the end there's so much devastation caused to the good guys that when couple more planets or couple more billion beings are about to be wiped out, you're thinking "So what?".

But if we lift the weight of all the EU's legacy and look at this story separately, it's actually a good story which is very likely to work out. So I understand why in fact DE has a lot of fans, and don't usually participate in the debates about its quality.

 

double post

 

He does get referred to as a "genius" in DE. And there's allusions to his cunning- letting Luke think he's getting the best of Palpatine, when really (from Palpatine's view) he's falling into Palpatine's trap.

 

Still to this day Dark Empire is some of the worst Star Wars ever written.

Need villains? Lets bring back Palpatine & Fett.

Need to be cooler than the Original Trilogy? Lets double/triple the size of the Super Star Destroyers.

Oh, and lets toy with turning Luke to the darkside.

Any enjoyment I've taken from this has come from the Dark Empire Source Book, which maybe be its only good quality. Well that and Billy Dee lending his voice for the audio adaptation.

 

It's very interesting for me to read the perspective of someone who only gets to know Dark Empire once the modern EU is fully formed, and really has an abundant amount of darksiders, especially with most of them called Sith these days. I read this at the very beginning, so it was really something special back then. But so were most of the early Bantam books, so...

Now, one thing that's actually pretty interesting is how well Palpatine's rebirth does fit into the post-prequel world view, up to the point that I keep wondering whether Lucas only got the "immortality quest" idea from Dark Empire, especially since this is only really introduced as Palpatine's theme in Episode 3 (Shmi's death is already setting this up for Anakin, though, as is the idea of little Ani hating change in the first one). And whether the sequels might really take this idea and run with it, since it would be a good way to forge the whole series into one topical saga, instead of the part-time heroes simply fighting a few more battles against the evil mastermind's henchmen.

Also, seeing Palpatine as an unleashed warlord who didn't wait for his body to age 60 years before letting loose works well with crazy mad Sidious in Ep3. He doesn't need to hold up the pretense of being the chancellor or emperor, everyone already knows that he's the evil mad man with superweapons, so why hold back?

 

I have always and continue to love Dark Empire. IMO, the Expanded Universe at it's best. It is one of the few topics that I disagree with my good buddy & fellow Mod Havac with as well.

Putting aside the obvious point of contention (ie, that the story works better if it was set immediately post-Endor, as it was originally intended), the series got a lot right. Characters like Wedge Antilles, Lando Calrissian, and Han Solo were fighting as generals on the front lines. Supporting characters like Mon Mothma, Ackbar, and Dodonna got some time in the spotlight. It introduced us to EU staples like the water world of Dac, Nar Shaadda, and war-torn Coruscant. It introduced, IMO, some of the best new starships designs for the early EU. MC90 Star Cruisers, World Devastators, E-wings, TIE/D fighters - the list goes on and on.

I could go on and on about it's many attributes, but suffice to say I think it is one of those EU works that has stood the test of time.

--Adm. Nick

 

Dark Empire is the series that introduced me to the EU. I'm always going to love it.