An interesting year ahead for Dark Horse.  With Lucasfilm having been sold to Disney, many of us are wondering does this spell the end of the relationship between Dark Horse and Star Wars?   Supporting this possibility is that when Disney acquired Pixar, all Pixar comic projects were ended at Boom! Studios and the licence moved to Marvel, which is owned by Disney.  Dark Horse has done a lot with Star Wars.  It has crafted, overall, a high quality of product, a diverse range of story settings and eras and possibly most important, it helped keep the flame alive for many in the early 90’s when there was no obvious film road map in front of us.

Part of Dark Horse’s strategy has always been having a stable of licensed material it can use to help support it’s other purpose of being a creator-owned friendly publisher (even before Image came about) that allowed creators a safe place to try new things and have creative freedom.   If this bread and butter arm is lost from the Horse’s licensed stable, I don’t believe it will spell the end of Dark Horse, but it would be the end of an era.  Still, much water to pass under the bridge yet.   For  a full listing of the February releases form Dark Horse, which does include Star Wars!, look to here at CBR.

BALTIMORE: THE WIDOW AND THE TANK – Another nice looking, and bizarre sounding, one-shot from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola with one of his favourite collaborators, Christopher Golden.   This is a two tale outing, first with a widow who’s status is debatable given her husband is not exactly rotting in a grave and more disturbingly, a child killing vampire is on the run from something supposedly even more monstrous than itself.  Think I’ll be rooting for the unknown monstrous vampire killer at this stage!

STAR WARS #2 – So if this is a sunset era for Star Wars at Dark Horse, this could be one of the finest ways for it to end with this, for now, on-going series set during the events of the original trilogy.  With Alex Ross covers, this series appears to be off to a promising start.  Boba Fett makes and appearance in this issue as well as the Emperor sending Vader off on a mission that is no doubt in the ‘republic good’