II was also a six-issue limited series published from 1994 to 1995. The final installment, Empire's End, was a two-issue limited series published in 1995. The trilogy is set after Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, which was published from 1991 to 1993. The individual comic issues each feature several pages of prose "endnotes" that provide additional background for the story, such as contextualizing Palpatine's goals and worldview through excerpts of encyclopedic volumes called the Dark Side Compendium written from his in-universe perspective. Collections The various series have been collected into trade paperbacks: Dark Empire (collects Star Wars: Dark Empire #1–6, 182 pages, May 1993, ) Dark Empire II (collects Star Wars: Dark Empire II #1–6, 168 pages, September 1995, ) Empire's End (collects Star Wars: Empire's End #1–2, 64 pages, September 1997, ) The entire metaseries has also been collected into a single hardcover, which also includes Star Wars Handbook 3: Dark Empire, a collection of illustrated essays on the characters, locations, and other elements of the story: Dark Empire Trilogy (352 pages, Dark Horse Comics, September 2010, , Titan Books, December 2010, ) It was collected again under Marvel's Epic Collection as Volume 5 of the New Republic series. This volume collects the three parts of the Dark Empire storyline, as well as some strips from Star Wars Tales, and the Star Wars Handbooks for X-Wing Squadron and Dark Empire (496 Pages, Marvel Comics, March 2021, ). Plot Dark Empire Six years after the events of Return of the Jedi, the Millennium Falcon leads a Rebel task force to Coruscant. Han Solo, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, and are heading to the planet to rescue Luke Skywalker, R2-D2 and Lando Calrissian, who have spent the past several days holding out against Imperial attacks after an earlier raid using the captured Star Destroyer Liberator goes awry and the warship crashes. The Rebels successfully rescue the survivors, but a massive energy storm appears. Luke sees the storm as a large disturbance in the Force, and asks everybody to leave him behind; he lets himself be devoured by the storm. The taskforce returns to the Rebel fleet in the Da Soocha system. Rebel commanders discuss the appearance of the Imperials coming out of the Deep Core and discover that Admiral Ackbar's homeworld of Mon Calamari is now under attack by a fleet of Imperial war machines. Called the World Devastators, the machines are designed to