Baffled on Batuu: What We Learned from "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge - Echoes of the Empire" #1

Back in January, Lucasfilm Publishing and Marvel Comics announced a new miniseries entitled Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge - Echoes of the Empire, which is ostensibly intended to provide an in-universe context for the expansion coming to the immersive land at Disneyland next week. Today issue #1 of the series hit comic shops and-- me being me-- of course I had to go out and grab it right away. So let's go through all of the notable moments that jumped out to me in this comic book and start piecing together whether any of this makes sense in the larger Star Wars continuity.

The story of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge - Echoes of the Empire #1-- entitled "Brawl at Black Spire" begins with a speeder bike racing through the streets of Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu. Then writer Ethan Sacks (who wrote the previous Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge miniseries in 2019) and artists Jethro Morales (Marvel Rivals) and Roi Mercado (Phoenix) cut to a back room of Dok-Ondar's Den of Antiquities, where we get our first cool connection.

• Page 1: Dok-Ondar speaks with his human assistant Tohago, who we first met in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge (2019). She has also been mentioned in the interactive Star Wars Datapad experience on the Play Disney Parks app and pops up in the young-adult novel Star Wars: Force Collector by Kevin Shinick.
• Page 2: Here we see Mubo, the Utai owner of the Droid Depot shop in Black Spire. We also meet Savi, owner of Savi & Son Salvage and the secretive Savi's Workshop, where Galaxy's Edge guests can build their own lightsabers. In the bottom panel, we're inside Oga's Cantina, which looks slightly different in layout than it does in real life, but we can chalk that up to artistic license. The bar is filled with recognizable alien species from the Star Wars galaxy, and in the background we can see DJ R-3X spinning tunes.
• Page 3: R-3X mentions that he likes being a DJ more than piloting tourist shuttles, a reference to his previous job at Star Tours. The hooded figure from the speeder bike makes her way to a back room where she meets with Oga Garra, the Blutopian proprietor of the cantina. Oga has been depicted before in stories set on Batuu, and Blutopians first showed up in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
• Page 4: The hooded figure is revealed to be Rey, and this made me pretty happy. I like that the rest of the story is a flashback couched in bookends set during the sequel trilogy era. For some reason that helps cushion the blow of the changes coming to the land for me.
• Page 5: Here we get a flashback to the High Republic era of the Star Wars timeline and cameo appearances by the Jedi characters of Carver Drow and Celesta Kami from the Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures animated series, who speak to Master Yoda via hologram. We're also introduced to the "MacGuffin" of the story, in the form of a Jedi artifact that the Jedi hid on Batuu, only to be dug up by Dok-Ondar roughly a century or so later.

• Page 6: Here we are told that the main flashback in this story takes place "months after the Battle of Hoth" (so between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) as Darth Vader is brought into the story.
• Page 7: We see Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 on their way to Batuu to get information on Jabba's Palace in an effort to rescue their friend Han Solo. And now we get to my biggest problem with this comic: it's meant to explain why Vader, Luke, Leia and Han are on Batuu, but Han is not at all present. In fact, he's frozen in carbonite on a completely different planet. The real problem is there is no specific point in the Star Wars timeline at which Vader (who dies in ROTJ) and Han are both present and Luke is wearing the Black outfit that we've already seen in Galaxy's Edge. Those three things never line up, so the characters coming to the parks can't coexist at the same moment. That presents a real problem for someone like Ethan Sacks, who was given the job of making sense of all this. Could it be addressed in a future issue? I don't see how.
• Page 8: We meet the new characters of Farmer and Stacks, who are former clone troopers, one of whom allied himself with the Empire during the Galactic Civil War, and the other who joined the Rebel Alliance. They're opening a store they want to name after themselves, but they can't decide on the order of the names, and we know in the park it's going to be called Black Spire Surplus. We also see Mubo in the flashback, so either that alien species ages well or one of Mubo's direct ancestors shares the same name.
• Page 9: Oga finds herself attracted to Chewbacca, and we know she has a history of dating Wookiees from the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge - Black Spire novel by Delilah S. Dawson.
• Page 10: Boba Fett shows up and it's implied that he and Luke have not met before, despite them having fought on Tatooine in the current-canon 2015 Star Wars flagship comic book by Jason Aaron.

• Page 11: There's a mention of the Fuzzy Tauntaun, a drink that guests can really buy at Oga's Cantina in the Disney Parks. Maz Kanata from the Star Wars sequel trilogy also gets a shout-out.
• Page 13: This story must take place after the events of the 2021 Star Wars: War of the Bounty Hunters crossover event series, as Luke is using his green-bladed lightsaber in this battle.
• Page 18: Boba Fett stabs Luke in his gloved mechanical hand, which the would-be Jedi received after his father Darth Vader chopped off his right hand on Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back.
• Page 21: I actually find it kind of odd that Mubo would offer to buy R2-D2 from C-3PO, as in my experience droids do not usually own other droids. On this page we also see the TIE Echelon landing on Batuu. This ship was designed for Star Wars: Episode IX when it was being written and directed by Colin Trevorrow and incorporated into the land at the same time. It has now been retconned from a First Order ship to one of Imperial design, to account for its use by Darth Vader in the land.
• Page 22: Oga convinces Boba Fett not to kill Luke, saying she needs him for something. I imagine we'll find out what that is in subsequent issues.
• Page 24: We get another look at Black Spire Surplus... or is it Farmer and Stacks'? Or Stacks and Farmer's?
• Page 25: Vader emerges from the TIE Echelon, giving this first issue its cliffhanger ending.

So I think my two biggest issues are how Han's presence on Batuu is not going to make any sense whatsoever within the context of this story, and the lack of continuity in the adversarial relationship between Luke and Boba Fett. I've accepted the retconning of the TIE Echelon, even though I would have vastly preferred for Disney Parks to pony up the money to build a Lambda-class Imperial shuttle on that spot instead. As for the stuff that does bother me, I'm crossing my fingers that it will make more sense once this miniseries is complete, but for now I'll have to see what I think after I have the chance to visit with Luke, Han, Leia, and Darth Vader at Disneyland next week.

Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge - Echoes of the Empire #1 is available now wherever comic books are sold, while issue #2 (of 5) will become available on May 27. The timeline expansion for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge goes into effect on Wednesday, April 29 at Disneyland.