Star Wars is no stranger to a retcon, with the biggest reveal of the Luke Skywalker saga being Darth Vader’s son being a retcon himself. As a transmedia franchise, Star Wars It spans books, comics, movies, TV shows, and more, which has opened the door for even more retcons over time. This led to some wonderful storytelling collaboration, but also some complications.
As mentioned, the revelation of Luke’s ancestry in The Empire Strikes Back challenged so many notions of Star Wars at the moment. This made Obi-Wan a liar when he claimed that Vader killed Luke’s father, lying for Luke’s benefit. The paternity reveal, however, also created a plot hole Star Wars comics that were only fixed 36 years later.
An official (wonderful) Star Wars tie-in folded into Obi-Wan’s ANH lies
Marvel Star Wars Annual 1 (1979)
After the release of the original Star Wars film in 1977, Marvel Comics continued the story with monthly issues of the magazine appropriately titled Star Wars comic series. These sometimes wacky adventures took Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, and the droids to new worlds all the time, expanding the galaxy beyond the film for the first time. Since they weren’t written by George Lucas, however, these comics simply had to take the film’s word for what it was – like Obi-Wan telling Luke that Vader and Anakin were separate people..
Marvel’s 1979 Star Wars Annual #1 by Chris Claremont and Mike Vosburg perpetuated this even further. On a visit to the planet Skye, Luke Skywalker and his allies help the locals fight the forces of an Imperial garrison and Darth Vader’s first apprentice. A local resident explains that years before, during the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi visited his world with not one, but two apprentices: the man who would become Vader and a man who wielded the lightsaber inherited from Luke – his father, presented as separate individuals.
Star Wars Actually Fixed That Plot Hole 36 Years Later
SkyeWalkers: A Clone Wars Story
In 2015, the last months of the Star Wars Expanded Universe brought the soap opera SkyeWalkers: A Clone Wars Story by Abel G. Peña. This story, commissioned by Star Wars Fan Club tells the same story mentioned above, of Obi-Wan Kenobi and his two apprentices visiting Skye during the Clone Wars. In this story, famous Star Wars Nerd and author Peña put the pieces together, fixing this continuity error once and for all.
As SkyeWalkers explains, Obi-Wan actually visited the planet Skye, but with Anakin and another EU character named Halagad Ventor. Later a Dark Jedi, Ventor was a Jedi during the Clone Wars who had lost his master and was therefore under Kenobi’s temporary tutelage. In this mission, Skywalker and Ventor exchanged lightsabers due to a very specific Jedi ritual, explaining that the man wielding the Skywalker saber was not actually a Skywalker, and that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in fact with two of his apprentices on Skye – cleaning the first big Star Wars plot hole decades later.