Luke's First Duel With Vader Was Actually Before 'The Empire Strikes Back'...And He Shouldn't Have Survived
Long-time Star Wars fans might remember that Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader met before their fateful duel on Cloud City. In the climax of Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of The Mind's Eye, the farmboy and the Sith have a lightsaber fight on the mud planet Mimban. Luke cuts off one of Vader's arms before the Dark Lord falls into a pit. Foster's novel, published in 1978 and intended as a low-budget sequel to Star Wars, should the movie have only moderate success, was borderline canon from the get-go and more or less invalidated once Empire came along.
But in the current canon, there was a duel between Luke and Vader that took place before the events of The Empire Strikes Back, although the word "duel" might be a bit of an exaggeration. In January 2015, after Marvel had regained the Star Wars comic license from Dark Horse, their first publication was a six-issue arc called Skywalker Strikes. The story took place shortly after the destruction of the first Death Star when Han Solo, posing as an emissary of Jabba The Hutt, traveled to the moon Cymoon 1 in the Correllian Industrial Cluster to negotiate the delivery of raw materials for the Imperial weapons factory located there. He was accompanied by Leia and Luke, disguised as Han's bodyguards.
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While Han and Leia were able to make it to the factory's main reactor, trying to overload it, Luke discovered some captured slaves and managed to free them. For once, the Rebel's plan seemed to pan out when Vader arrived on Cymoon 1. He immediately sensed the presence of the person who destroyed the Death Star and confronted Luke deep in the underbelly of the factory. At this point in time, Vader didn't know Luke's name, nor that he was his offspring. But, on the other hand, Luke still believed that Vader had killed his father, and amidst Ben's spiritual warning to run away, he attacked Vader seeking revenge, telling Vader that he had seen Vader killing the old Jedi Master.
Throughout the Star Wars comic series, which included 75 issues and ran until November 2019, Luke was searching for someone or something, helping him learn the ways of the Force, now that Ben Kenobi was gone. On Cymoon 1, he was far from the man he would be in Episode V, naïve and overconfident in his own powers, and so Vader was just toying around with Luke, having no problems blocking his clumsy attacks and mocking him for his lack of Force control and handling the lightsaber.
When Luke attacked again, Vader tossed Luke's lightsaber out of his hands, and was about to cut Luke's head off in a similar way to how he had beheaded Count Dooku, when the foot of an AT-AT (looking different from the ones used in the Battle of Hoth) crashed through the ceiling. Han and Leia managed to steal one of the Imperial walkers on their escape from the reactor. Still, them nearly crushing Vader with the war machine was not intentional, but just dumb luck that allowed Luke to run away and survive.
In the fighting between Vader, the stormtroopers, and the walker destroying everything in its way, Luke took one of the Imperial speeder bikes (the same ones used on Endor) and started to wreak havoc among the Imperials. Watching this, Vader admitted to himself that he might have been too quick to dismiss the boy, wondering what Kenobi had thought of him. The fighting between the Rebels and the Imperial continued, with Luke constantly escaping Vader's onslaught, who now wanted to get the young pilot alive. Finally, Luke managed to get his lightsaber back and fly the speeder bike into the factory's reactor, closely followed by Vader.
The end of this 3-issue story arc is a bit abrupt with Luke and Vader seemingly caught in the exploding factory and Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C-3PO stuck on the Falcon, that had been dismantled by local junk scavengers. However, the next panel has our heroes all happily escaping from Cymoon 1, with Vader staying back amidst the rubble, making plans to find the boy and teach him in the ways of the dark side, now that seemingly no one else was there to help him become a Jedi.