It wasn't that long ago that Star Wars comic books were considered a dying breed, until Dark Horse helped resurrect the franchise in the early 1990s with its "Dark Empire" series. If you walk into almost any comic book store in America today, you'll find new Star Wars titles from Dark Horse, such as the popular titles "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" (KOTOR) and "Star Wars: Legacy." The two series have breathed new life into the Star Wars canon, but can they help revive Star Wars comics? TwitchGuru spoke with the writers of the two titles to find out.

Star Wars comic books have been around since the first Star Wars movie - now properly referred to as "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" - changed everything in 1977. The complete six movie saga, as diehard Star Wars fans know, is just one component of the larger "expanded universe" that includes both traditional books as well as comic books. Both "KOTOR" and "Legacy" got their start in 2006, after Dark Horse Comics decided it was time to reinvigorate their Star Wars titles. In a bold gamble, Dark Horse cancelled their existing titles and started new ones.

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The two new titles occur at opposite ends of the timeline of the Star Wars expanded universe. "Knights of the Old Republic" occurs some 4,000 years before the events of "Star Wars Episode IV," while "Legacy" occurs 130 years after the original movie. The period that the KOTOR comic book explores has been tackled by Dark Horse before in its "Tales of the Jedi" series. Of course, KOTOR is also the title of the wildly popular Star Wars video game from Bioware, arguably the best of all time (KOTOR II was developed by Obsidian). KOTOR comic author John Jackson Miller used both sets of materials to help him with the comic book.

"I had access to a lot of materials in the games, of course, which really helped - I quickly found out that there are so many events and possible conversations that you may not always get them all," Miller told TwitchGuru.com. "Clearly, the events of the games were influential. In looking at them, I decided that the kind of stories I wanted to tell worked best if they began a few years before the first game. This way we get the opportunity to hint at those events, while drawing on the previous comics works from the 'Tales of the Jedi' era."

The KOTOR storyline follows the adventures of Jedi padawan Zayne Carrick who is wrongly accused of killing a number of other padawans. Carrick hooks up with a "diverse" crew as he escapes the Jedi and Republic forces that are after him. The first KOTOR issue was published in January 2006, and has seen more than a dozen issues published in the last year.