Beilert Valance is a cyborg bounty hunter created by Archie Goodwin, Walt Simonson and Bob Wiacek for Star Wars #16 (Marvel, 1978). He is one of the earliest wholly original characters in Star Wars comics — invented for the newsstand series when it ran out of film to adapt — and he returned in Star Wars #27 and #29, drawn by Carmine Infantino.
The idea underneath him
Valance is a former Imperial stormtrooper who was catastrophically injured and rebuilt with cybernetics. The 1978 debut states the premise directly: parts of his body were replaced to keep him alive, and he abhors what he has become. He hunts droids and anyone associated with them, which makes his loathing precisely self-directed. That is a startlingly clean tragic engine for a licensed comic published a year after the first film.
He gets there before the films do
Consider the timeline. Marvel published a bitter half-machine bounty hunter with a hatred of his own prosthetics in 1978. The Empire Strikes Back would not put a bounty hunter with dialogue on screen until 1980, and would not reveal that its principal villain was largely artificial until the same film. Valance was, briefly, the most developed bounty hunter in the entire franchise.
Legends, then silence
His original run is Legends. He recurred in Marvel's Star Wars comics into the early 1980s and then largely vanished for three decades, remembered mainly by collectors of the newsstand era and cited as an example of how strange and inventive the 1977–86 Marvel run was allowed to be.
Brought back into canon
Marvel reintroduced him to current continuity in Han Solo: Imperial Cadet (2018) by Robbie Thompson and Leonard Kirk, this time as a young Imperial pilot who loses an eye and a leg in combat and whose replacement cybernetics the Empire declines to pay for. The bitterness is the same; the cause is now bureaucratic rather than merely tragic, which is a sharper reading of the Empire.
Target Vader and after
He headlined Target Vader (Marvel, 2019), written by Thompson with art by Marc Laming, in which a syndicate assembles a team of bounty hunters to kill Darth Vader. He then became a lead of Ethan Sacks and Paolo Villanelli's Star Wars: Bounty Hunters, the 2020 ongoing that ran forty-two issues and made him, at last, a permanent fixture rather than a curiosity.
Why the site keeps a full dossier on him
Because he is the best available argument that the comics were never a sideshow. A character invented in a 1978 newsstand comic by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson is now a canonical fixture of Marvel's modern line — which is not something you can say about very many licensed properties.