NEWS
RANDOM HOUSE WORLDS TO PUBLISH NEW ‘THRAWN’ MANGA
Adaptation of Best-Selling Novel Tells Grand Admiral Thrawn’s Origin Story
Posted by Brigid Alverson on September 16, 2026 @ 9:02 am CT
Random House Worlds will publish Star Wars: Thrawn (The Manga), a series adapting Timothy Zahn’s best-selling 2017 novel Thrawn, which tells the origin story of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The first volume of the adaptation by Man Tsang will be released as a 224-page paperback on September 29, 2026, with an MSRP of $14.00.
Lucasfilm announced the graphic novel adaptation in 2025 (see “New ‘Star Wars’ Graphic Novels”), but what makes this particularly interesting is that the publisher is Random House Worlds, which is the Random House imprint dedicated to licensed books, rather than Marvel or Dark Horse, which publish most licensed Star Wars comics. Zahn teamed up with comics writer Jody Houser for a graphic adaptation of his 2018 novel Thrawn: Alliances, which was published by Marvel as a four-issue miniseries in 2024 (see “Star Wars Comics”), and Marvel has done other Thrawn comics as well.
Thrawn first appeared in Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire, published in 1991, and has since become a part of the Star Wars canon, appearing most recently in the Disney+ live-action series Star Wars: Ahsoka (see “‘Star Wars: Ahsoka’”) and the animated series Tales of the Empire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brigid Alverson
Contributing Editor. Alverson has been writing about comics since she launched MangaBlog in 2005. She wrote the Comics A.M. column for Robot 6 (now part of CBR), and currently edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. In her earlier life, she had roles at magazine and book publishers.
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