One thing I have not ever done much of is read the multitudes of Star Wars Graphic Novels. Considering my fan level of both Star Wars and comic books, this seems odd.. even to me. I cant even think of a good reason why I never bothered. 

But now is better than never I guess. And now has much easier options than I might have had before. A lot (not all) of the material is now available digitally. So Kindles, laptops, tablets even mobile phones are perfect for Graphic Novels and just comic books in general. I have been using all of those options for quite some time for my other comic reading so for me this should be quite easy to dive into the Star Wars Universe.

Um… no. Easy is not the word I would use at all. On a scale of 1-10 I would consider myself in the 8 range of Star Wars fandom. Sure I get my timelines, character appearances and lore series jumbled.. from time to time. But I was 100% not prepared for what finding a reading order could do to your sanity. And to be completely truthful,, I’m still not even sure I actually figured out what all the books are, or where they start and end.

To be clear, I am only talking about Graphic Novels today, not the written books and novels. Those are for another day (if the Force is with me). And not just single issue comics either. I’m after the trade paperbacks

So to figure out just where to start my reading, I did the natural thing and start Googling. “Star Wars Graphic Novel reading list” “where to start the Star Wars Graphic Novels”. Sure that sound great, but you end up getting a hundred different lists of completely different orders. In fact, just finding a complete list of the books in any order felt like complete luck.

Those generic searches just smash all the formats together and throw away the keys to figuring anything out. You might be looking at single comic issues, trades, epics, omnibus’. A single is a single, a trade is a collection, but an epic is also a collection,, and then there is a bigger collection called omnibus.. All covering generally the same stuff, but different…. sometimes. Yeah that don’t make sense to me either. 

And then because alot of the websites I went to are older, there is also the problem (if it is even still a problem) of legend vs canon. Basically older comics are no longer considered canon due in part to the Disney take over. But any newer list site makes this pretty clear.  

The canon material is divided up into eras or sections of the Star Wars timeline… of course using the BBY denomination. The six (6) distinct time frame groupings are: The High Republic, Fall of the Jedi, Reign of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, The New Republic, Rise of the First Order.   

Thats all well and good, but as you may have noticed from the last batch of movies, most of the other media are tied in with each other. A lot more than one might think. You might remember hearing that you should read this comic or that book first before seeing this or that movie, because the movie just jumps in without explaining some things that happened off screen.

But that seems to be the case with the entire canon inventory. Some lists only show the order of the Graphic Novels, some also list the paperbacks in their order,, which makes sense, but if you are only interested in the comics, then you gotta do some weeding out. 

So like I said, I’m not even sure if I really did start in the correct place. I started with the High Republic series,, but I just found another new site today that has an up to date layout,, https://youtini.com/timelines/canon/canon-comics but, as single issue. I’ll have to find which trades collect these up,, but it looks like a good starting point.

This has really been chaotic, but I’m working on it. I’ll keep a posting somewhere on this site and maybe on Twitter of what I’m currently reading and what I’m looking for next. Maybe I’ll hold off on trying to wrap my head around that regular paperback list for a while.

In the meantime, check some of these sites and see if you can decifer a decent route to read…

https://www.comicbookherald.com/the-complete-marvel-reading-order-guide/star-wars-reading-order/

https://comicbookreadingorders.com/other/star-wars-marvel-reading-order/