At the New York Comic Con Dark Horse announced two new Stars Wars series with strong online connections.  Star Wars: The Old Republic will be an exclusively online production, while Star Wars: Invasion will appear online in May at starwars.com and then in print in July.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years prior to the Star Wars movies, the same era chronicled in Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic comics.  The Star Wars: The Old Republic saga will be written by Rob Chestney and it will introduce gamers and comics fans to the world of the massive multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is being created by Bioware, a division of Electronic Arts.

The Star Wars: The Old Republic comics feature stories that span the three decades between the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant to the critical events at the start of the online game.  The exclusively online Old Republic strip starts this month with stories by Bioware’s Chestney and art by Alex Sanchez.  New episodes will be published every other Friday at starwarstheoldrepublic.com. 

Dark Horse’s other new Star Wars initiative, Star Wars: Invasion is set 25 years after the Battle of Yavin and covers the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, which was chronicled in some 19 Star Wars novels published by Del Rey between 2000 and 2003. This era in Star Wars history is known as the New Jedi Order as the Jedi of Luke Skywalker’s newly established Jedi Temple do battle against the Vong.  The new comics series takes place around and between the action described in the novels.  The action-packed Star Wars: Invasion comic will be written by Tom Taylor and illustrated by Colin Wilson.  The series will be published in a series of five-issue story arcs, which will then be collected in trade paperback editions.  Star Wars: Invasion will debut online in May and in print beginning in July.