By: Dominic Jones
The Star Wars Show was chock full of huge news this week! Not only did it contain the announcement of a new trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story coming tomorrow morning, but it also contained some major Star Wars comics news as well. With the conclusion of Star Wars: Darth Vader this week, Marvel announced a new ongoing series that would take its place beginning in December. The series, titled Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, will follow the adventures of the titular characterafter the events of Darth Vader #25 (out today). The series will see Aphra return to what she knows best, being a space archaeologist and will feature the droids BT-1 and 0-0-0 and the Wookiee bounty hunter black Krrsantan. The series is written by Kieron Gillen, who created Aphra for the Darth Vader series.
Gillen also spoke about the upcoming series with StarWars.com, where he described what fans can expect from Doctor Aphra (warning: contains spoilers from Darth Vader #25),
"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]"
He also addressed the fact that this is the first Star Wars comic of the new canon based on an original character, and not one from the films or TV series,
"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."
You can read the entire interview with Gillen, wherehe discusses Aphra's final scenes in Darth Vader #25, why he enjoys writing the character, and more, over at StarWars.com
Follow The Star Wars Underworld on Twitter @TheSWU for more updates about this story and other breaking Star Wars news.
