Cover: Phil Noto

Star Wars #3

Sep 2025 · Marvel · 3.99 USD

📊 ~161,226 copies sold its debut month

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“Complications”

About this Issue

Star Wars (2025) #3 is the third chapter of Marvel's first ongoing series to plant the Original Trilogy's core cast firmly in the New Republic era — the sprawling, largely unmapped gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens that canon comics had barely touched before this volume launched in May 2025. The issue deepens the series' central tension by staging an emotionally charged reunion of Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, and cyborg bounty hunter Beilert Valance on Bespin's Cloud City, a setting laden with franchise history, and uses layered flashbacks to flesh out the pre-Alliance friendship between Han, Lando, and Chewbacca in ways that feel consequential rather than decorative. It also marks the first in-story appearance of the desert planet Loradil, where a crashed New Republic corvette crewed by survivors is menaced by dormant Clone Wars–era battle droids — a storytelling choice that threads prequel-era Star Wars history into the post-Imperial moment. Taken together, the issue establishes that Segura's run is willing to interrogate who these heroes actually are outside of war, rather than simply placing them into a new conflict.

writer Alex Segura · artist, inker, colorist Phil Noto · letterer VC's Clayton Cowles · cover Phil Noto

ComicBooks.com Value

Our Model is In Beta

CGC 9.8 · 40 in census $62*

CGC 9.6 none in existence

CGC 9.4 · 1 in census $30*

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Our model’s value — refined as new sales data arrives · CGC census counts shown where available

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History

Alex Segura, a New York Times–bestselling crime novelist and comics writer, launched the 2025 Star Wars series at Marvel fresh off the sprawling Battle of Jakku maxiseries he had written for the same publisher. Editor Mark Paniccia shepherded the book, and Phil Noto — a veteran Star Wars cover artist with a long history of interior work for Marvel's Star Wars line — handled pencils, inks, colors, and the main cover simultaneously, giving the title a distinctive, painterly visual consistency across its run. Segura has spoken publicly about approaching Han Solo as a 'P.I.-type character' in this era, partnering him with Valance to play off the tension between Solo's new respectability as a New Republic general and his irredeemably scoundrel past — a dynamic that issue #3 brings to a head through Valance's pointed interrogation of whether Han is ashamed of who he used to be.

Trivia · 8 facts

Published July 16, 2025 by Marvel Comics; written by Alex Segura with full art (pencils, inks, colors, and cover) by Phil Noto; lettered by VC Clayton Cowles; edited by Mark Paniccia.
The issue is the third chapter of the ongoing series Star Wars (2025), which is set approximately 6 ABY — roughly two years after the events of Return of the Jedi and before The Force Awakens — Marvel's first ongoing Star Wars title to be set in this post-Original Trilogy era.
Primary plot: Han Solo and Beilert Valance, meeting on the Outer Rim world of Suboreen, are called to Cloud City on Bespin by Lando Calrissian, whose old Nagai contact Garlev has crash-landed there with intelligence for the New Republic but dies before he can fully deliver it.
The issue features extensive flashbacks to a pre-Alliance job on the planet Karimenen involving Han, Lando, Chewbacca, and Garlev, deepening the established friendship between Solo and Calrissian with new canonical backstory.
The planet Loradil — a desert world in the Fenril sector — makes its first in-canon appearance in this issue, introduced as the crash site of the New Republic corvette Nechrim's Wake, whose survivors are confronted by a dormant battalion of Clone Wars–era battle droids at the issue's cliffhanger close.
New Republic pilot Rynn Zenat, a character introduced by Segura in the earlier Battle of Jakku — Insurgency Rising #1 (October 2024), continues her subplot in the Fenril sector alongside Luke Skywalker in this issue; she is a recurring, not a debut, character here.
Beilert Valance, the cyborg bounty hunter who first appeared in Marvel's original Star Wars #16 (1978), continues his role as a series co-lead; the issue explicitly frames his complicated dynamic with Han — two men who survived morally gray pasts — as a source of ongoing dramatic tension.
The complete 10-issue run anchored by this issue was later collected as the trade paperback Star Wars: Out of the Darkness, which also incorporates the Free Comic Book Day 2025 short story 'Past is Prologue' by Segura and Noto.