Dark Horse spent most of its licence going everywhere except the films. Old Republic, far future, Clone Wars, the years between the trilogies — anywhere but the eighteen months where the three leads are actually together. In 2013, with the sale of Lucasfilm announced and the licence visibly running out, Brian Wood got to write the one book everybody had been asking for.
Leia is the lead
The premise is simple and it works: Yavin is a victory that solved nothing, the Alliance needs a new base, and there is an informer inside it. Leia is assigned a covert X-wing squadron. She is written as a serving officer rather than a princess with a blaster, and the book takes her competence completely seriously — the flying sequences are hers, not Luke’s.
Carlos D’Anda
D’Anda draws hardware like a man who has measured it. The X-wings have weight, the Star Destroyers have scale, and the space battles are legible in a way Star Wars comics frequently are not. Alex Ross covers on the first arc gave the book a poster-art authority it honestly earned.
The compromise
Twenty issues is not a run, it is a truncation. The book was still setting up when Marvel’s 2015 relaunch was announced, and the last handful of issues visibly hurry. Wood also has to work around the fact that nothing here can matter — every character is committed to a film three years away.
Filed as Legends. Marvel’s Jason Aaron run occupies the same slot in canon and covers some of the same ground. This one got there first and is, on the specific question of what Leia Organa does for a living, better.
