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Spoiler alert: We're starting with spoilers in this story, so if you're a comic reader or you just don't want to know the secret, you'll want to stop reading right here.
Surprise! Han Solo was married all along!
That's according to the sixth issue of Marvel's new Star Wars comic, in which Princess Leia and her eventual love interest run into someone who introduces herself as Sana Solo. As in Han Solo. As in his wife, who you can see below.
The comic ends without further explanation, so it's unclear how the apparently unhappy couple wound up in the bonds of surprising matrimony. We'll have to wait for next month's issue to find out why weird, timeline-altering things keep happening to Han Solo.
Oh, sure, it's also a little weird that we're just finding out about this right now, what with franchise's first movie nearly 40 years old, but this is why the term retcon exists.
Star Wars #6 wraps up the comic's first story arc. Set between the events of the first two movies — A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back — writer Jason Aaron admits that he's still figuring things out.
"I still feel like I'm learning as we go," Aaron said in an interview on the official Star Wars site today. "There's so much stuff. As I've always said, I was a big Star Wars fan growing up, because I was the perfect age. Even though we've started a new canon, there's still so much stuff out there that can be used and played off of. So, yeah, I still feel like I'm learning a lot and figuring out all the possibilities. The Lucasfilm Story Group has been a big help with that."
Writing and evolving characters at Lucasfilm, he said, isn't altogether different than how it's done at Marvel.
"It's always wild to have meetings with them, because at Marvel, we have these retreats where we sit around and talk about Marvel characters in a kind of shorthand, because that's what we do," he said. "We're writing these characters constantly. The Luasfilm Story Group has that same sort of language with Star Wars. They know these characters and this story and this entire timeline like the back of their hand. It's always great to know that you have them keeping an eye on everything that we're doing, and giving us a helping hand when we need it."
The story group Aaron refers to resides at Lucasfim. The studio's president, Kathleen Kennedy, announced its formation in April 2014. Established to oversee the Star Wars franchise's creative development spanning games, TV, films and more, it began with the position that the first two film trilogies and the Clone Wars animated series constituted canon. Everything that was once known as the Expanded Universe was set aside and rebranded under the Legends moniker.
Marvel's Star Wars series exists under the story group's supervision. Whether that makes Sana Solo canon isn't clear, as the films have typically defined the canonical events in the universe.
We do know, however, that Lucasfilm is filling in the gaps between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens with non-film works like the upcoming Aftermath trilogy of novels by Chuck Wendig.
The definitely canonical Star Wars: The Force Awakens is scheduled for a Dec. 18, 2015 release. Why not watch the second teaser trailer again below?
