Doctor Aphra is easily one of my favorite additions to the Star Wars canon over the last decade. She’s essentially a lesbian, scumbag Indiana Jones in space, constantly uncovering powerful artifacts from the past and caught in the crosshairs of both the Rebellion and the Empire. Her ambiguous alignment is so much fun because it turns every story into a true mystery of whose side she’ll end up on.
I think that’s what sets Star Wars – Doctor Aphra: Chaos Agent apart from previous volumes. At this point in time, the Empire is crumbling and the New Republic is rising. Doctor Aphra has been caught in a scheme redhanded and just as she’s about to get locked up without a key, in walks one of the architects of the New Republic, Luke Skywalker. While he doesn’t offer Doctor Aphra outright clemency, he does offer her a job to reduce her sentence.
Marvel
Turns out, after the Empire fell, there was a whole lot of galactic history that went unaccounted for, and by Luke’s estimation, Doctor Aphra was the best one to recover it. This series is a wonderful beginning for the character that ultimately feels like an ending as this entire era of Star Wars comics was sent to pasture relatively quickly.
It almost feels like a Metroid game, where Samus loses her powers in the beginning just to slowly gain them back over the course of an adventure to give you a sense of progression. Her electro-tattoos are confiscated and she has to earn them back. Her trust is eroded and she has to earn that back too. The five-issue miniseries is all about building her back up again.
Along the way she gets to team up with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and someone from her past with a deep connection to ear that’s revealed in satisfying fashion. It’s a tour of the post-Jedi Star Wars universe and it feels like shockingly fertile ground that’s plowed but never seeded. AIPT enjoys this era of Star Wars Comics; it’s just a shame that Marvel doesn’t seem to enjoy supporting them as much as we do.
In that regard it doesn’t feel like a Metroid game, it feels like a goodbye. Like, let’s go on a series of fun adventures before we put you on the shelf and really figure out what to do with you. Which is a real bummer because with the rigid moral code of Jedi and Sith, and even to an extent characters like Han, Lando, and Chewie, Doctor Aphra offers such a fun dive into moral ambiguity. While she ultimately ends up doing the right thing (most of the time), she’s always taking the scenic route, and pushing the boundaries of the people in her life.
Marvel
Why that works so well is because she’s, more times than not, the smartest person in the room. She’s able to angle her way out of any situation in unexpected ways. Cherish Chen probably has my favorite handle on the character since she debuted. Their Doctor Aphra is always a bit of a jerk, but she’s almost always right, so she’s earned it.
Gabriel Guzman, Kieran McKeown, and Steven Cummings split the penciling duties across the five issues, and there’s a surprisingly effective consistency despite having three cooks in the kitchen. The McKeown issues stand out the most, with fewer facial details the colors by Mike Atiyeh really pop, making it feel like an ’80s music video at times with a gorgeous sunset lighting the characters and the exotic worlds they’re in.
As quickly as this era of Doctor Aphra began, it ended, despite a strong mission for the titular character and a fun, open-ended universe that truly allowed anything to happen. Gorgeous art is coupled with at times impressively detailed pencils and at other times impressively lit locales. More than just a book for Doctor Aphra fans, this book shows a side of Star Wars that fans underwhelmed by the current live action fare would do well to check out. But don’t get too attached to anything here, it’s over before you know it.
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