Star Wars: Republic

Dark Horse started this book in December 1998 with no idea what it had. The Phantom Menace was six months away, nobody outside Lucasfilm had read the script, and the brief was a monthly comic set in an era that did not exist yet. Prelude to Rebellion, the opening arc, is a Ki-Adi-Mundi story about a Jedi Master going home, and it reads exactly like what it is: a book waiting for permission.

The turn

Permission arrives around issue #19. Twilight hands the book to John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, gives them Quinlan Vos — a Jedi with no memory, no discipline and an appetite for the dark side — and lets them run. What follows is the best sustained argument in Legends about what the Jedi Order was actually like before it fell: an institution that sends its most damaged member undercover for years because it needs the intelligence, and then cannot decide whether he is an asset or a heretic. Aayla Secura, invented here and later written into Attack of the Clones, is the other half of that argument.

Then the war arrives

From issue #49 Republic becomes Dark Horse's Clone Wars book, and the pressure shows. It is now expected to fill in the three-year gap between two films, coordinate with a trade-paperback programme, and hand off characters to five other titles. Some of it is superb — The Battle of Jabiim (#55–59) is the grimmest thing the licence published in this period, a Republic defeat with clones dying badly and Anakin Skywalker learning that he can be left behind. Some of it is filler with a deadline. The Genndy Tartakovsky micro-series was simultaneously telling a slicker version of the same war on television, and Republic never quite settles the comparison.

The ending it earned

The last stretch is remarkable. Siege of Saleucami, Loyalties and Into the Unknown take the series past Order 66 and into the silence afterwards, and Hidden Enemy (#81–83) closes Quinlan Vos's eight-year arc with a choice rather than a duel. The numbering did not stop: Dark Times carried it on inside its own covers from #84.

Reading it now

All Legends, all contradicted, and still the most complete picture anyone has drawn of the Republic's last decade from inside the Order. Start at Twilight (#19). If it does not hold you by Darkness (#32–35), it never will.