In June 2006 Dark Horse Comics launched a new Star Wars series entitled Star Wars: Legacy.  Set 137 years after the Battle of Yavin, (a.k.a. Episode IV: A New Hope, for those not obsessed with dates and titles), we meet Cade Skywalker, a descendant of Luke Skywalker who has given up his Jedi heritage to pursue a life as a bounty hunter. The galaxy is in a state of civil war, with a Sith Lord seated on the Imperial Throne seeing his power being challenged by many different forces.

This series is the brain-child of writer John Ostrander and artist Jan Duursema, who had previously worked together on over 50 issues of Star Wars: Republic.  The tagline for the series was great; it simply stated:  "All new Sith Order! All new Empire! All new Skywalker!"

Cade isn’t the nicest guy in the galaxy either. Think: what if Han Solo was a Jedi?  He saw his father killed in at the Jedi temple by Sith and has vowed revenge.  The first three arcs in issues 1-13 set up the universe and what we might expect for the series.

Issues 14-19, entitled “Claws of the Dragon,” make up the 4th arc for this series and are reprinted in Star Wars: Legacy, Volume 3 - Claws of the Dragon.  This arc had some big payoffs and advanced the plot of the series further. 

Cade is bringing in a Jedi master to the Sith on Coruscant when he is captured and delivered to the self-proclaimed emperor of the Sith Empire, Darth Krayt.  In a story that somewhat mirrors the Emperor/Vader/Skywalker scenes in Return of The Jedi, Krayt tells Cade he will learn to be a sith or die.  He injects Cade with a venom that causes excruciating pain and can only be expelled using a dark-side power. Krayt is hoping that once Cade starts using the dark side, he won’t be able to stop.

This arc was important for several reasons. Darth Krayt had been introduced in the series preview issue #0, and, after a year, readers would finally learn his identity.  It had been teased for awhile that Krayt was someone who knew Anakin Skywalker; there were many guesses on the various message boards on who it was and how they were alive some 160 years after the events in Revenge of The Sith.  We not only learn who the Sith lord is, it’s someone readers who had read earlier Star Wars were familiar with, but I won’t spoil that here. 

Not only does this arc reveal who Darth Krayt is, we get some back-story on one of the greatest Jedis of all time, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we learn the identity of Cade’s mother, who left because she was called back into service by the empire and abandoned her family.  It’s someone Cade had run into in a previous issue and was another great revelation that only the readers were privy to.

Star Wars: Legacy took a gamble by jumping the Star Wars saga 100 years past what we knew about it and it has paid off.  It’s a great series. In the hands of Ostrander and Duursema, readers won’t know what to expect, but they will get a great story worthy of the name Star Wars!