Princess Leia has enjoyed the spotlight this year as the new “Star Wars” ongoing comic series and the novel “Razor’s Edge” have explored her exploits in the early days of the Rebellion. All of this calls to mind a 1995 story that trod similar ground: The four-issue Dark Horse comic series “River of Chaos.”
It’s a gorgeous-looking series, as June Brigman provides clean lines that are nicely inked by Roy Richardson (whose other “Star Wars” credit is as a writer — on Marvel Issue 84, the Han Solo-centric “Seoul Searching”) and vibrantly colored by David Nestelle. It’s penned by Louise Simonson, whose only other “Star Wars” credits are the Lando-centric Marvel Issues 56 and 57, and it has a decidedly Marvel “Star Wars” vibe: A community on the mining planet M’haeli finally decides it must rebel against the Empire rather than try to placate it.
Hitting the Marvel tropes, one of our heroes (in this case, Leia) pops onto a planet to help the local rebellion, and the story’s central character has some position of planetary power — Mora, a beautiful curly locked human raised by a H’drachi father, is the heir to the M’haeli monarchy. It also has a love interest from the other side of the tracks for Mora in the form of Ranulf, an Imperial officer investigating the especially corrupt Imperial governor on this planet. As the two are drawn to each other, a rebel cell gradually grows to encompass humans and H’drachi and even Ranulf.
Taking that Marvel “side adventure” template to an extreme, though, Leia is largely a background character. Sure, she’s leading the resistance on M’haeli, but the “camera” never focuses on her. She’s the rallying point for the rebels, leading with both military strategy and inspirational speeches.
It’d be interesting to learn the story behind this story. Was Simonson asked by Lucasfilm to use Leia only minimally? Or was the opposite the case: Did Lucasfilm ask her to include Leia so there’d at least by one major character present? In 1995, it was rare for a “Star Wars” story to be set during the classic era yet not feature main characters, so “River of Chaos” certainly bucked the trend. But apparently it didn’t translate into sales; the series is one of the few that was never collected into a trade paperback — although it did eventually get reprinted in an omnibus.
Also, “River of Chaos” loses a little something because — like so many Marvel characters our heroes ran into — we never see Mora or Ranulf in other adventures, nor does Leia ever speak of them again. (It’d be cool to see some of these neglected Rebel heroes reappear in the new ongoing “Star Wars,” even in small roles.) On the other hand, the forgotten nature of “River of Chaos” also makes it a fun curiosity amid my longboxes of “Star Wars” comics.