Marvel and Lucasfilm have announced Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles, a five-issue limited series written by Kevin Smith and drawn by David Marquez that will bring the two universes together. The series launches in January 2027 as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first Star Wars film.
The news comes via an exclusive to Entertainment Weekly. And yes, that means Luke Skywalker can finally meet Spider-Man, and Doctor Doom can compare armor-cleaning tips with Darth Vader. The images by Marquez shared in the article feature several different Marvel characters with characters from that first, original film. According to the article, a reality-shattering spell will bring the events of Star Wars: A New Hope to Earth-616, putting Marvel’s heroes in the middle of the Galactic Empire’s assault on the Rebel Alliance.
“Back in the early ’80s, I had a subscription to Marvel’s Star Wars comics,” Smith said. “And as fun as it was to follow the continuing adventures of Luke, Leia and Han, I always wished that Spider-Man or Doctor Doom could cross over into their cinematic saga.”
Smith will get his wish when Hope Assembles begins in January, with a new issue arriving each month through May.
Marvel and Lucasfilm are calling Hope Assembles the first-ever official Star Wars crossover; while everyone from Godzilla to Aliens to Sonic the Hedgehog to Star Trek have crossed over with other properties, Star Wars has not engaged like that before, that I can remember, anyway. The only real comics “crossovers” I can think of are kind of oddballs … the first being 2019’s Marvel Comics #1000, which celebrated 80 years of Marvel comics, with each of the 80 pages representing a year in the publisher’s history. The page for 1977 featured Darth Vader, but he didn’t actually interact with any characters outside his own universe.
The other one was with another Lucasfilm property back in 2004, when Dark Horse Comics published a rather bizarre Star Wars crossover that brought together two of the most famous characters played by Harrison Ford: Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
The story, “Into the Great Unknown,” appeared in Star Wars Tales #19, a “What if?”-esque anthology series that gave creators considerable freedom to tell unconventional and non-continuity Star Wars stories. Written by W. Haden Blackman and illustrated by Sean Murphy, the 10-page story begins with Han Solo and Chewbacca being forced to make a blind hyperspace jump in the Millennium Falcon, and they end up on Earth.
Things don’t go particularly well for Han, who is killed by the planet’s inhabitants. Chewbacca survives, eventually becoming the legendary Sasquatch of Pacific Northwest folklore. More than a century later, Indiana Jones and his sidekick Short Round arrive in the area searching for the creature and discover the wreckage of the Millennium Falcon, as well as Han Solo’s remains.
So this crossover is fairly monumental, given that Marvel and other companies have been publishing Star Wars comics pretty much since the first movie came out, but they’ve never interacted with other universes until now.
Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles #1 arrives in January 2027, with the five-issue series running through May.