In 1991 there had been no new Star Wars comic in five years and no new Star Wars film in eight. Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire appeared in May; Dark Empire #1 followed with a December cover date. Between them they turned a dormant licence into a publishing programme.
What it actually does
Veitch's premise is a provocation: Luke Skywalker, having spent three films refusing the dark side, walks into it on purpose. He kneels to a resurrected Palpatine, becomes his apprentice, and intends to destroy the Empire from the throne room. It is either the boldest idea in Legends or the one that broke it, depending on which decade of fandom you ask.
Cam Kennedy's art is the reason it works. He paints in flat, heavy, saturated blocks — no glossy realism, no attempt to mimic the films. Byss is a bruise-coloured nightmare, the World Devastators are genuinely industrial, and the whole book looks like nothing else with the logo on it.
Its long shadow
Cloned Emperors, Force storms, the Jedi Holocron, the notion that the Empire's remnant is a going concern rather than a mopping-up operation — all of it starts here, and much of it was still being argued over in novels published fifteen years later. When Lucasfilm reset continuity in 2014, Dark Empire was among the first things quietly left behind.
Verdict
Read it for Kennedy, read it for nerve, and read it knowing that the Legends timeline is downstream of it in ways that are not always to its credit.
