The guide to collecting Star Wars Legends – the old Expanded Universe – comic books by Marvel and Dark Horse. Find every omnibus, Epic collection, hardcover, and trade paperback in reading order. Part of Crushing Comic’s Guide to Star Wars. Last updated February 2023 with titles scheduled for release through November 2023.
These 30 years of comics were removed from canon (along with nearly everything else that wasn’t a film or TV show) in 2014 when LucasFilms announced the impending Episode VII and the move of their comics license to Disney sibling Marvel Comics.
That means these stories have all been rendered out-of-continuity to the current Star Wars universe. Compared to current canon, these stories range from alternate retellings to complete fiction, much as we regard children’s stories and fairy tales.
However, just because these Star Wars Legends stories are no longer in continuity it doesn’t mean they are not worth reading. They include a massive 25-year effort to maintain an interconnect, cross-media canon that began nearly a decade before The Phantom Menance and stretched all the way through the announcement of the sequel trilogy!
Along the way, these comics – combined with other Expanded Universe works like novels, video games, and magazines – defined centuries of Star Wars canon (including the original Old Republic!), introduced memorable characters (like Thrawn and Mara Jade), and filled in deeper layers of tragedy and drama of the rise and fall of the Empire that the films alone could not construct.
These stories were once collected comprehensively and in impressively-detailed reading order by Dark Horse Comics in a set of paperback Omnibuses. When Disney moved the Star Wars license back to Marvel Comics in 2015, Marvel began to repeat that methodology (with some tweaks) into their own Epic Collection format.
Marvel’s Epic Collections are broken across the broad, identifiable eras of Expanded Universe continuity. While they largely maintain the Dark Horse Omnibus reading orders, they have made some tweaks to placement both for continuity and to maintain the relative parity in the length of their books.
With a dwindling amount of Epic Collections left to release, in 2022 Marvel pivoted into recollecting the Expanded Universe a second time – now into hefty oversize hardcover omnibus editions.
Many thanks to Kurtis from The Epic Marvel Podcast for his aid in some of the continuity and contents of books covered by this page!