Three years after Dark Empire ended, Dark Horse brought the same team back for the same trick. Dark Empire II opens with Palpatine already resurrected again, already commanding a fleet, already one clone body ahead of everybody, and that is the problem with the whole book in a sentence.
What still works
Cam Kennedy. Six issues of flat, hot, poster-coloured art that looks like nothing else Lucasfilm licensed in the nineties — the Empire's hardware is genuinely ugly in the way real war machinery is ugly, and the Deep Core worlds read as places rather than backdrops. Todd Klein's lettering is doing quiet, unglamorous work holding Veitch's very dense captions to the page.
The Jedi-recruitment thread is also the seed of something. Luke going out to find the scattered survivors of the Purge — Kam Solusar, Empatojayos Brand — is the first time Legends treats rebuilding the Order as a job with logistics rather than a montage, and Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy novels ran straight through the door it opened.
How it has aged
Badly, and specifically. Dark Empire could be defended as one audacious swing: Luke falls, Leia catches him, the Emperor dies again. Dark Empire II is that swing repeated, and repetition is what turned "the Emperor survived" from a shock into a running joke that Legends spent two decades trying to walk back. By the time Empire's End puts Palpatine in the body of an infant and kills him for a third time, the stakes have inverted: nothing can be lost permanently, so nothing can be won.
The prose is also relentless. Veitch narrates through captions at a density that reads as a novel someone has stapled to a comic, and Kennedy's art is asked to illustrate rather than tell.
Where it sits
Read it if you read Dark Empire and want the rest of the story; read Empire's End straight afterwards, because the two are one book split by a nine-month gap. Do not start here, and do not treat it as the argument for what nineties Dark Horse could do — X-Wing Rogue Squadron and Crimson Empire make that case far better.
