41 Years Later, Star Wars Is Finally Filling in Its Most Interesting Canon Gap
The sequel we've always wanted.
What happened right after the Empire was defeated at the Battle of Endor? The celebrations at the end of Return of the Jedi tell one story: the entire Star Wars galaxy changed in an instant, and nothing was the same anymore. But, realistically, nothing would have changed that fast on a scale so vast. And the details of the direct aftermath of Return of the Jedi have been one of the most interesting moments in Star Wars canon, a moment that now, is getting more scrutiny and space than ever before.
As a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi, a new Marvel comics series, Star Wars: The Battle Of Jakku — Insurgency Rising, picks up the story of the Rebellion just hours after the decisive victory at Endor. As fireworks light up the skies of various worlds, this series tells a very different story, one that Star Wars fans have been looking forward to for a long time.
“The Battle of Endor was only part of the ending,” writer Alex Segura tells Inverse.
Warning: Mild spoilers ahead.
Rise of the Imperial Remnant
Rey is living on Jakku at the beginning of The Force Awakens.
With this new series, Segura is returning to writing for Star Wars, having previously written the 2020 YA novel Poe Dameron: Free Fall, as well as the short story “Resolve” from the 2022 anthology Stories of Jedi and Sith. But he says this specific era, right after Return of the Jedi is something “fans have really clamored for a sense of what came next, and how it leads into the other big stories in the Star Wars universe.”
The other big stories Segura is alluding to are both obvious and circuitous. By the time of the Mandalorian era, five years after Return of the Jedi, the Imperial Remnant is a whole big headache for the New Republic. But at this point in the story, just hours after Return of the Jedi ends, Leia hasn’t even started building that nascent senate yet. As Han says early in issue #1 of Insurgency Rising, “These Imperial dregs have to be cleaned up fast and you’ve got a Republic to form.” This statement from Han foreshadows the primary threat of the new four-part miniseries, which leads to an interesting comeback for some canon characters fans may have forgotten about.
New (Old) Star Wars Villains
Bragh and Adelhard are the Rebellion’s worst nightmare.
Among some of the Star Wars deep-cuts are the characters of Bragh and Governor Adelhard. Bragh is a shock trooper wearing Darth Vader-ish garb who was first introduced in the 2015 mobile game Star Wars: Uprising, which, though largely forgotten, is still totally canon. But the mastermind behind a ruthless Imperial resistance force is Governor Adelhard, who, in flashback story, we learn was a contemporary of Tarkin and Thrawn in the glory days of the Empire. This character was created for the Uprising game alongside Bragh, though Adelhard has been mentioned in various novels and comics since 2015.
Before Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian and the return of Thrawn in Ahsoka Season 1, the biggest bads in the Imperial Remnant were Bragh and Adelhard. With Insurgency Rising, Segura’s writing is bridging the gap not just between the New Republic and Rebellion, but the Empire as we see it in the Mando-verse, and the Empire as it was right after Palpatine’s demise.
It’s all leading to the Battle of Jakku, a definitive conflict that signals the Empire’s last stand. But as the narration tells us at the start of the comic, wars in the Star Wars mythos don’t just stop quickly because some marker in canon says so. Instead, the opening pages of the comic tell us wisely: “Wars don’t end in a flash. They end in phases.”
And with this post-Return of the Jedi tale, one phase of galactic history is about to make a lot more sense.
“Our hope here is to showcase the final days of the Empire,” Segura says “And the untold stories that wove through that unexplored era.”
