Star Wars has a long history with comic books — in fact, the very first Star Wars comics debuted before the very first Star Wars movie hit theaters.
Issue at Hand is Polygon’s webseries about the weird world of comics, and today’s episode is all about the history of Star Wars comics: how Star Wars may have saved the industry in the ‘70s, and how the comics industry helped give Star Wars a huge resurgence in the ‘90s.
More than that, we also talk about the fantastic crop of current Star Wars comics that are contributing to the new Star Wars expanded universe. Thanks to the Lucasfilm story group, they’re just as canonical as the new Star Wars movies.
Want to learn even more about the fascinating, stranger side of comics? Catch up with every previous episode of Issue at Hand in our playlist below. And check out our Star Wars hub to discover even more things you may not have known about the franchise.