Who published Star Wars, and when

Star Wars has been a comic since before it was a sequel. Marvel's first issue carried a cover date of July 1977 and reached shops while the film was still an unknown quantity, and the licence has passed between three companies and a scattering of imprints in the five decades since.

This page is the shape of that history rather than a list of everything in it. The series database has the list.

Marvel, 1977–1986

The original run lasted 107 issues plus three annuals. It opened with a six-issue adaptation of the film by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, settled under Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino, produced an adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back with Al Williamson that remains the best-drawn Star Wars comic anyone has published, and finished with Jo Duffy and Cynthia Martin telling post-Return of the Jedi stories nobody had asked for and few have read since.

Two spin-offs ran under Marvel's children's imprint, Star Comics: Ewoks (fourteen issues, May 1985 to July 1987) and Droids (eight issues, April 1986 to June 1987). In Britain, Marvel UK began reprinting the American material weekly on 8 February 1978 and ran through a sequence of retitles to a final issue in June 1986, commissioning original British strips whenever it outpaced its source.

The gap, and the strangest thing in the catalogue

Between the end of Marvel's licence in 1986 and Dark Horse's first issue in 1991 there was almost nothing — except Blackthorne Publishing's Star Wars 3-D, three stereoscopic issues from December 1987 onward, printed in red-and-blue anaglyph for the tenth anniversary of the film. Four more were announced for 1989 and never appeared.

Running underneath all of it, from 1979 to 1984, was the newspaper strip: twenty-seven serialised storylines syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and the Watertown Daily Times, launched by Russ Manning and finished by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. For four years it was the most widely read Star Wars fiction in the world, and it is the part of the history most often left out.

Dark Horse, 1991–2014

Dark Empire arrived with a December 1991 cover date, six months after Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, and between them they turned a dormant licence into a publishing programme. Dark Horse went on to produce over a hundred Star Wars titles in twenty-three years — Tales of the Jedi, Republic, Knights of the Old Republic, Legacy — and, in 1998 and 1999, manga adaptations of the original trilogy and The Phantom Menace.

What Dark Horse did that Marvel had not was build a timeline. The Old Republic, the far future, the Clone Wars: all of it was invented in these comics and then borrowed by everything else.

Marvel again, 2015 onward

Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and already owned Marvel, so the licence went home. The flagship Star Wars launched in January 2015 and ran 75 issues plus four annuals; Darth Vader, Doctor Aphra and the multimedia High Republic initiative followed. Everything published from April 2014 is current canon; everything before it is Star Wars Legends, and this catalogue labels every row.

IDW and the all-ages line

IDW Publishing held the all-ages licence from 2017, and Star Wars Adventures ran 32 issues from September 2017 to July 2020 — two short stories an issue, drawn flat and bright, ranging across the whole saga. It is canon, it is genuinely good, and it is the part of the catalogue adult readers most reliably skip.