Death rides a pale horse. Image : Greg Smallwood ( Marvel Comics )

In the space of weeks, Marvel went from proudly announcing a new Darth Vader miniseries at New York Comic Con to scrapping the whole thing entirely. Now, less than a month later, they’ve already found a replacement.




Marvel has announced—via the official Star Wars website—Vader: Dark Visions, a new limited miniseries that will launch in March. That’s just two months after the Chuck-Wendig-penned Shadow of Vader miniseries was set to originally debut. Instead, days after its announcement in October, Marvel fired the writer from the project three issues in, with Wendig citing internal concern at the publisher over his political commentary on social media as a primary reason for his exit.

Written by Jean Grey’s Dennis Hopeless and featuring art from Paolo Villanelli (with Brian Level stepping in as the series’ artist from issue 2), Dark Visions is being pitched as an anthology series that examines Darth Vader as a figure of terror, power, and even hope, through the lens of various people around him, promising to shed new light on the Dark Lord of the Sith in ways readers had never seen before.


If that all sounds familiar, it’s because...well, it is.

Greg Smallwood’s cover art for Vader: Dark Visions #1. Image : Marvel Comics

When it announced Shadow of Vader at New York Comic Con back in October, Marvel likewise pitched the book as being a series of stories presented by different voices in the galaxy far, far away—all about their reaction to brushing up against the infamous Darth Vader as a vehicle for exploring unseen sides of Palpatine’s dread enforcer. Hell, Dark Visions even features cover art by Greg Smallwood, who had already been tapped to draw covers for Shadow of Vader, two of which were revealed before the book’s scrapping.



It’s impossible to say if Dark Visions is simply Shadow of Vader with a new name and creative team—for one, we’ve yet to see anything from it, and we’ll likely never see anything of Shadow beyond Smallwood’s two covers. But it isn’t exactly difficult to see that there are some parallels between what Shadow of Vader had planned to do, and what Dark Visions is offering—so it feels like we’re getting a new team’s rendition of a similar theme.


Regardless of how Dark Visions plays out, the shadow of, er, Shadow of Vader will continue to linger over it. Vader: Dark Visions #1 is set to hit shelves in March 2019.

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