Everybody remembers the final scene of Return of the Jedi, right?
The Emperor is dead. Darth Vader is dead. The Empire has fallen. Luke, fresh from burning his father's body, shares some hugs with his friends and a wink with a trio of ghosts (one of whom was not Hayden Christensen, darn it).
Then he joins Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, the droids and a whole mess of musical Ewoks for some hand-clapping, all-smiles festivities. "The war's over," you can hear them thinking. "We won!"
End scene.
It was the end of the movie and the entire trilogy, too. But had the cameras kept rolling, what would we have seen after the party? Did Han whip out a ring and propose to his Princess? Did everybody join hands for a chorus of "We Are the Champions"? Did they just collapse into soft-but-entirely-too-small Ewok beds for the night and catch up on sleep for days on end?
Fans have always wanted to know what happened to our favorite characters next. With The Force Awakens promising to depict a future "30 years later" that's still dangerous and filled with as many Stormtroopers as ever, you have to wonder why the Rebellion didn't try to form a new Republic (as the Expanded Universe depicted for years). Or maybe it did, and failed miserably. We simply don't know.
But very soon, we're going to. Marvel Comics — which has been churning out one Star Wars comic after another of late — has announced its next Star Wars title, and it may be the biggest and most important one yet.
Lucasfilm and Disney have dubbed everything that helps fill in the 30-year gap between Jedi and Awakens as material belonging to the Journey to The Force Awakens initiative. Marvel's first title for this time period is called Star Wars: Shattered Empire, and Marvel is describing it as the next story that happens right after Return of the Jedi.
Shattered Empire is being written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Marco Checchetto. The story was crafted in close collaboration with Lucasfilm's "Star Wars braintrust" group to ensure its place in series canon. In other words, Shattered Empire is the official, real story of what happened after Jedi — every bit as valid as the movies themselves.
Details are, predictably, being kept under tight wraps. But the series launches in September.
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