New Ongoing Marvel Comic Series “Doctor Aphra” Coming December 7th!

doctor-aphra-1-coverRecently, it was revealed that a new ongoing Marvel series would be hitting the shelves this December, which would take the place of the now finished Darth Vader series by writer Kieron Gillen.  Although the series was announced a few weeks ago, the title was kept under wraps – until now that is.  The Star Wars Show revealed yesterday that Doctor Aphra, an original character from the Darth Vader series, would be the titular character in her own ongoing comic starting December 7th. Hit the jump for starwars.com’s interview with the writer of the new series, Kieron Gillen.

 

 

Warning: Contains Spoilers for the Darth Vader series…

 

Doctor Aphra has been described as a morally bankrupt “Indiana Jones” archetype within the Star Wars universe.  She is an opportunist and a seeker of ancient artifacts and a quick dollar.  Her first introduction to comic readers was in Darth Vader #3 where she is first seen in a scene very reminiscent of an Indy film, and eventually, her unique skill set lands her a job working for the Sith lord himself.

 

Darth_Vader_Vol_2_final_cover

 

When your main character is a seriously evil Sith lord who makes no time for jokes or lighthearted banter, you have to get some levity from somewhere else, and Aphra effortlessly filled that void in an otherwise morose story.

 

Aphra may have brought some much needed comic relief, but she was no idiot, as she was perfectly aware that Vader would dispose of her when her resources were no longer needed.  However, the knowledge of her short-time arrangement didn’t keep her from jumping on an opportunity for work, and her keen ability to constantly prove her usefulness kept her one step ahead of death by lightsaber (or worse) throughout the series.

 

darthvader25-5

 

At the end of the series, Aphra does survive the wrath of Vader, but she had to make him think she was dead in order to pull it off.  Doctor Aphra picks up where Darth Vader ended and follows the archaeologist on her adventures with her Wookiee partner (for now) Black Krrsantan and her two murderous droids Triple-Zero and Beetee, who quickly became fan-favorite characters in their own right.

 

According to Gillen, Doctor Aphra is a very different series from Darth Vader in tone (it is not just Darth Vader Part 2). The series will take Aphra on adventures across the galaxy looking for ancient artifacts and trying to pay off her ever-increasing debts. Apparently, her father will also factor heavily into the story.

 

 

(from starwars.com)

 

StarWars.com: I think people are going to be really excited about the prospects of an Aphra title. As her creator, how do you feel?

Kieron Gillen: Enormously excited. It’s Marvel’s first ongoing starring an original character not from the movies. There’s so much to like about Star Wars, I sort of sit back and say, “Oh, I should be more freaked out than I am.” [Laughs] The story I always tell is, Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I saw in the cinema. So essentially, me writing the lead-in to my own entry into pop culture [with Darth Vader], that should be some existential crisis. In actual fact, it’s been joyous and freeing and actually, incredibly good fun. In the same way as this, but with a weird level of pressure upon it as a character who’s been a big part of this story. But you know, she’s not like, somebody in the movies. She’s not somebody with a built-in fanbase. The idea of doing something like that, oh yeah, that’s certainly intimidating…but I like intimidating. It keeps it fun.

StarWars.com: What can you tell us about the story?

Kieron Gillen: [Laughs] Um… Basically, it picks up kind of where, if Darth Vader ever finds out Aphra survived, she’s dead again. So she’s living in hiding. She’s trying to get back to her life of archaeology and she’s dealing with the fact that she has enormous debts. She owes Black Krrsantan, the Wookiee, enormous amounts of money, so she has to try to pay him off, but the bigger problem is that she promised to help locate the people who trained and tortured him. She is trying to deal with the droids [Triple Zero and Beetee], and the droids are a ticking-time bomb, shall we say. In the last series, Vader obviously was the big threat you were meant to be scared of, and the droids become increasingly serious. [Laughs]

StarWars.com: The thing about the droids is, you’re kind of waiting for them to figure out a way to kill everyone around them.

Kieron Gillen: It can only be [a matter of] time. But that’s the dynamics. She’s trying to get work, and the inciting incident is, she’s found this cool old artifact. This artifact, which is great, maybe she can sell it, she can pay off her debts, and she’ll be fine. At which point she realizes her actual doctorate has been revoked, or is being investigated. She’s no longer going to be Doctor Aphra. And that means, due to the complicated situation in the universe, she can’t actually sell this artifact. She can sell it through the black market, but that’s going to be a tiny amount of the actual money she would have got if she’d sold it legitimately. So that’s the kind of initial problem, and this is because her dad enters the story, is the best way of putting it. And of course, she’s being investigated because, obviously, she cheated on her doctorate. [Laughs] We make no bones about that.

 

Aphra at the Falcon

 

StarWars.com: How do you view her, or how will she be portrayed, at this point in her life? Do you think she skews more villain, more hero? Is she somewhere in between?

Kieron Gillen: I’ve just come off Darth Vader, where I somehow made people root for like, basically, one of the greatest villains of all time. [Laughs] You know? So it’s a bit like that. She’s a bad person in many ways. At the same time, she’s in a universe with the worst people. It’s a good way of putting it — she does come in between the two. You do see her do good things and bad things…It’s about her relationship with her dad. As you can imagine, there’s a level of tension there, because her parents split up and her mum moved away to the Outer Rim, and that’s why her mum got killed. The mum’s idealism kind of got her killed, and Aphra holds a grudge for that.

This is the main reason I wanted to do the book. What I wanted to do was, okay, let’s really show what makes Aphra tick…She kind of thinks the Empire is probably, on the larger scale of things, good. She’s a child who grew up in war, and war has killed many more people than a fascist regime. At the same time, she’s not going to obey the fascist regime. [Laughs]

She has these moments where she realizes she’s gone in over her head, and then she tries to get out of them. That final scene in Darth Vader #25, the thing is, she’s just managed to squirm away from Darth Vader. She’s free. “That was fun. Let’s never do it again,” is the last line in Darth Vader, and you don’t believe for a second. You think that’s all she’s doing? “No, you’re going to get in some awful situation.” And that’s kind of the fun of it. That’s the fundamental fun of the character, and you can root [for her], because she makes really bad life decisions and sort of rolls with them. In the universe, most people are worse than her. She doesn’t like killing people. She’s not like a random murderer. She just has her needs.

StarWars.com: The funny thing about learning that she was really inspired by Indiana Jones is that she does get in over her head like he does, but personality-wise, she’s not much like him. She’s like a darker version of him. In terms of the tone of the series, are we going to get something like a darker Indiana Jones meets Star Wars?

Kieron Gillen: Yeah, that might be a good way of looking at it. Both Indiana Jones and Star Wars came from a much earlier period of cinema, and so I’m kind of playing with those two things together. My favorite thing is the archaeology aspect in Star Wars, because Star Wars is a very old universe. That’s kind of the point of it. So she can get to into these really weird, old cave systems and have weird stuff happen to her. It’s so much about the high adventure of it; she almost immediately gets into a quest. And it’s always a mixture of new stuff and old stuff. It’s enough to make people feel it’s Star Wars and also, “you’ve never seen something like this before.” That’s what the book kind of runs off. It’s like a high adventure book. It’s the adventure archaeology book, running around the Star Wars universe, and getting into trouble. [Laughs]

StarWars.com: Just to wrap it up — in your career, you’ve written tons of villains and you just wrote the Vader series. Do you feel like it’s going to be good for your sanity to write someone not so evil?

Kieron Gillen: [Laughs] Any writer who writes bad people normally says, “I don’t like villains.” Everyone does stuff for a reason, and in Darth Vader you had a philosophy. I’m pretty safe in describing Aphra as a bad person, but at least half the stuff she does ends up hurting herself more. She’s a complete mess up. [Laughs] And I quite like writing that stuff, too. That’s my basic interest. The joke is like, Aphra now is with Black Krrsantan, Triple Zero, and Beetee — three who are much more homicidal than she is, and she’s more like the well-balanced, reasonable member of the group. [Laughs]

 

I for one am a fan of the character and am excited to see her get her own series.  What interests me the most is the fact that this is the first Star Wars comic not directly based on a character from the films or TV series. So far, Aphra only exists in the comic book medium, which lends to endless possibilities with where her character could end up.  I’m all for canon connectivity, but there’s something exciting about having a unique story that doesn’t have to lead in to a story that we already know.  With Doctor Aphra, Gillen can take readers anywhere in the galaxy that he wants to go.  Many comic book readers  have been wanting something fresh in the world of Star Wars comics, and it looks like this series may be just what the doctor ordered.

 

 

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Jordan Pate is Co-Lead Editor and Senior Writer for Star Wars News Net, of which he is also a member of the book and comic review team. He loves all things Star Wars, but when he's not spending time in the galaxy far far away, he might be found in our own galaxy hanging out in Gotham City or at 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center, NY.

Jordan Pate (Hard Case)

Jordan Pate is Co-Lead Editor and Senior Writer for Star Wars News Net, of which he is also a member of the book and comic review team. He loves all things Star Wars, but when he's not spending time in the galaxy far far away, he might be found in our own galaxy hanging out in Gotham City or at 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center, NY.

19 thoughts on “New Ongoing Marvel Comic Series “Doctor Aphra” Coming December 7th!

  • October 13, 2016 at 6:11 pm
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    Dope

  • October 13, 2016 at 6:12 pm
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    Aphra’s cute and everything, but how on earth did she survive Vader?! I thought we wouldn’t see anyone of Vader’s pawns after #25.

    • October 13, 2016 at 7:23 pm
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      Read the final Vader issue. 🙂

      It makes sense and was the only way she could have survived.

      • October 13, 2016 at 8:14 pm
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        I’ll have to wait a while for that… where I live Vader is at issue 14, and I don’t want to buy the comic digitally as I’m paying much less for the phisical copy.

  • October 13, 2016 at 8:08 pm
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    Very glad to see her get an ongoing; looks like we haven’t seen the last of Aphra. ^_^

  • October 13, 2016 at 10:02 pm
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    Groovy. I’m mostly excited about the droids.Triple Zero is one of my favourite NEU characters.

  • October 14, 2016 at 12:30 am
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    I’m meh at best about this book. I didn’t find anything about the character all that interesting. She seems like the female Dash Rendar, especially with the murder robots and a wookie sidekick.

    • October 14, 2016 at 3:08 am
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      She didn’t wow me either. Good for a couple of issues, though. The evil protocol droid was way cooler, imo.

    • October 14, 2016 at 3:22 pm
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      Except better in every way

      • October 14, 2016 at 3:22 pm
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        That’s your opinion, sure.

        • October 14, 2016 at 4:22 pm
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          Yes. That is all we have when measuring something’s worth.

          • October 14, 2016 at 4:36 pm
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            When YOU’RE measuring what somethings worth. Your opinion has no standing on mine, because it’s mine. See how that works?

          • October 14, 2016 at 4:38 pm
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            Wow, did you miss the point by a parsec.

            Yeah, that’s EXACTLY what I am saying. My opinion is my own, which is all that matters to me when measuring something just like YOUR opinion is the one you use to measure.

            FFS.

  • October 14, 2016 at 12:46 am
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    2 droids looking like R2 and C3po… do writers know how to think outside the box?

    • October 14, 2016 at 3:21 pm
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      There are droids that look like them in the movies b/c they are standard models.

  • October 14, 2016 at 3:12 am
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    She got more annoying to me in every issue, but I like the droids.

  • October 14, 2016 at 5:04 am
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    I thought she was like a female Indiana Jones in the star Wars universe.

  • October 14, 2016 at 11:14 am
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    Aphra is indeed an interesting character. Whether she can sustain her own title remains to be seen, though.

    I first thought of her as a somewhat amoral, but not really dark character that blundered into a situation where she had to serve Vader. She clearly got a certain thrill from it, yet she also knew eminently well that he would not hesitate to kill her whenever she had outlived her usefulness. You could sort of sympathize with her.

    Then she went to Naboo to find confirmation for what Vader already strongly suspected: that Padmé was no longer pregnant when she was buried. Aphra had her trusty droid Triple-Zero torture Commodex Tahn, the mortician that prepared Padmé’s body for burial, until he confirmed that she had given birth prior to death. Then Aphra had Tahn murdered.

    To me, that was the moment Aphra irrepairably tainted herself. We got some glimpses of her own tragic background in the same comic, but it is no excuse. She has blood on her hands, and would have deserved the end Vader ultimately intended for her — though her cleverness let her survive.

    But she is essentially a villain now, responsible for torture and murder. I hope the new comic will not try to make a hero out of her.

    • October 14, 2016 at 3:21 pm
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      Well from the looks of the Han Solo esk set up on the cover I would say that she will be the classic “anti-hero”

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