New STAR WARS Comic Just Retconned The Millennium Falcon’s Story in THE FORCE AWAKENS

Ten years after the sequel trilogy launched, Star Wars is still finding new ways to complicate its own history. With the anniversary of Star Wars: The Force Awakens fresh in fans’ minds, Marvel Comics has delivered what might be one of the strangest continuity misfires in the franchise so far.

Instead of filling in a clean narrative gap, the new comic Han Solo – Hunt for the Falcon ends up rewriting a key piece of the movie in a way that simply doesn’t line up.

When The Force Awakens introduced Daisy Ridley as Rey and John Boyega as Finn, it didn’t take long for them to cross paths with one of the most iconic ships in cinema history.

The Millennium Falcon was sitting on Jakku, written off as junk and apparently lost by Harrison Ford’s Han Solo years earlier. That mystery was part of the fun. Han later confirms he’s been actively searching for his ship, irritated that his trail went cold in the wrong part of the galaxy.

During his exchange with Rey, he grumbles to Chewbacca that they “should’ve double-checked the Western Reaches,” before guessing that a thief named Ducain was responsible. Rey fires back with surprising confidence, saying, “I stole it from Unkar Plutt. He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain.”

That brief scene establishes two important things. Han hadn’t found the Falcon yet, and Rey’s knowledge of its recent history is genuine. Or at least, it was.

Marvel’s Han Solo – Hunt for the Falcon, by Rodney Barnes, Guru-eFX, and Ramon Rosanas, is set before The Force Awakens and follows Han and Chewbacca as they reunite to track down their missing ship. On its own, it’s a fun read. Han sounds like Han, the banter works, and the chase across the galaxy hits familiar beats. The problem is where the story ultimately lands.

Over the course of the miniseries, Han literally retraces the Falcon’s entire theft history. Ducain. The Irving Boys. Unkar Plutt. He even confronts Plutt directly. Worse, the final showdown happens on Jakku itself.

Han realizes pushing any further will get him killed and decides to walk away, knowingly leaving the Falcon behind. That revelation crashes into the conversation we already saw play out on screen in The Force Awakens. Han acts in the film like Jakku was a blind spot. The comic says he stood there, face to face with the truth of the Falcon, and left anyway.

Trying to square those two versions of events is rough. The only explanation that halfway works is that Han and Chewbacca were pretending during their talk with Rey, testing her story to see if she could be trusted.

But there’s nothing in The Force Awakens, its novelization, or any related material that hints at that being the case. The movie plays the scene straight, and the comic undercuts it entirely.

Continuity issues don’t stop there. Hunt for the Falcon #5 includes a dream sequence that’s framed like a memory, using the same visual language the series previously used for real flashbacks.

In it, Han pilots the Falcon through Imperial space while his family is on board. Ben Solo is present and old enough to speak. That’s where things really fall apart. The Empire officially fell at the Battle of Jakku, which occurred around the time of Ben’s birth.

Even accounting for lingering Imperial remnants seen later in The Mandalorian, there was no recognized Imperial space by the time Ben could talk. The timeline just doesn’t work.

This isn’t the first time Marvel’s Star Wars comics have stumbled over established canon. Last year’s Battle of Jakku event struggled to line up with Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy and even skipped over a major Luke Skywalker moment that had been teased in Ken Liu’s The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Those missteps were frustrating, but they at least involved tie-in material colliding with other tie-in material.

Hunt for the Falcon directly contradicts the movie it’s meant to lead into. That makes it harder to shrug off. The characterization is solid, the art looks great, and parts of the story genuinely work. But as an official bridge into The Force Awakens, it collapses under its own weight.

Han Solo – Hunt for the Falcon #5 is on sale now from Marvel Comics.