Much of what we know about the events immediately in the wake of Return of the Jedi in contemporary Star Wars continuity has been left in broad strokes for almost as long as the rebooted canon has been around. In the run up to The Force Awakens, Lucasfilm’s transmedia initiatives made great strides to begin setting up the framework of the Empire’s complete fall and the formation of the New Republic, but in the last 10 years, those stories have faded into the ether—books and comics out of print, mobile games long since shut down, even the broad bones of this turning point in Star Wars‘ galactic narrative remains patchwork. Now, Marvel is revisiting that crucial period to do some stitching—and in the process, gives us a remarkable look at how the other Skywalker sibling felt as the second Death Star burned above Endor.
The first issue of Star Wars: Battle of Jakku – Insurgency Rising—the first of three Marvel miniseries exploring the early period between Return of the Jedi and the Battle of Jakku that formally brings an end to the Galactic Civil War just a year later—by Alex Segura, Leonard Kirk, Stefano Raffaele, Rachelle Rosenberg, Alex Sinclair, and Joe Caramagna, hit shelves today, and is already beginning to weave together the various threads that played out this time nine years ago in what would become known as the “Journey to The Force Awakens” transmedia project. Pulling together on everything from the Acolytes of the Beyond from Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath novels, to the rise of Imperial Governor Adelhard in the Anoat Sector (explored in the scrapped EA mobile game, Star Wars: Uprising), the debut issue manages to effectively condense and more directly weave together the bigger picture of the Rebel Alliance’s immediate challenges after its victory over Endor. But its best scene is one that was never really explored in those early transmedia canonizations, and raises a fascinating question: how did Leia Organa feel about the death of Darth Vader?
We know much of Luke’s interiority of course, thanks to Return of the Jedi. He knew the truth, he knew his real connection to Leia, he redeemed the man that was Anakin Skywalker, and laid him to rest atop the flaming burial pyre that claimed the ashes of Darth Vader. But Insurgency Rising #1 gives us a compelling mirror to Luke’s peaceful acceptance of what he came to know about his father in a perfect set of Leia moments.
Sneaking away from the celebrations on Endor, we glimpse a moment of Leia visiting the burning remnants of the pyre Luke built, as she attempts to wrestle with how she should feel about the death of her father. It’s an important reminder that Leia’s own experience of Vader at this point in the movies and in Marvel’s own comics is one of ceaseless terror and antagonism—the agent of the Empire that imprisoned and tortured her, that brutally tore her from the man she loved, that stood as the very face of everything she was fighting for in the Rebel Alliance. She hasn’t seen the side Vader presented to Luke in Empire‘s climax or throughout Return, or throughout the interiority of his own comics, the man being pushed and pulled between the seeming inevitability of his dark fate and the light that was once so prominently part of him. So Leia’s reaction to this truth of who Luke is to her, and who Vader is in turn, is not one of sympathy or understanding, but rage.
To Leia, her father already died when Tarkin and Vader pulled the trigger on Alderaan. The family she embraces is the one that she has made in the Alliance, and is preparing to make with Han, not the connection she now knows she has with Vader. It’s a brief but potent scene made all the stronger when the issue follows up the day after—by having Luke confront Leia about her reaction, sensing the emotion, and the anger, from her keenly enough to know exactly what she did the night before. It takes the mirror established in the prior scene between Leia and Luke and makes it more literal as they stand in opposition to each other. Luke begs his sister to understand, to know the empathy he came to feel for their father, and offers Leia a chance to train away the anger he sensed in her last night, but Leia doesn’t want to. They’re quickly interrupted by a Rebel development that climaxes the issue, but the scene plays with the fascinating idea of what we came to know about the Jedi during the prequels just as it’s cut off. Leia doesn’t want to suppress or compartmentalize what she feels in this moment—the grief, the anger, the elation, the love—the way Luke can. His empathy for their father and his final redemption is as alien to her as her anger in this moment is to Luke.
We know that, eventually, in time, Leia will accept her part in the legacy of the Skywalker bloodline, both in terms of her father’s true nature, and as someone who would become part of the next generation of Jedi alongside her brother. But in this initial, raw moment, we get to see what really separates Luke and Leia as characters in a fascinating way—something we’ll hopefully get to dig into more as the series continues.
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