Chelli Lona Aphra is a human female archaeologist, created by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larroca, introduced in Star Wars: Darth Vader #3 (Marvel Comics, March 2015). She is the single biggest breakout of the modern comics line and the first character created for current canon to carry a long-running solo book.
The pitch
Aphra is what happens if you take Indiana Jones, remove every ethical constraint, and give him a doctorate he cannot stop mentioning. She recovers weaponised artefacts for whoever is paying, keeps company with the murder droids 0-0-0 and BT-1 — explicit dark mirrors of C-3PO and R2-D2 — and repeatedly survives by being more useful alive than dead. Her working relationship with Darth Vader is the funniest and most alarming thing in the 2015 line.
Her own series
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra ran from 2016, relaunched in 2020, and has been written by Gillen, Simon Spurrier and Alyssa Wong among others. The books do something the films rarely try: they follow a person who is not on either side of the war and does not want to be, and they let her be genuinely, consequentially bad at relationships.
Canon only
Aphra has no Legends counterpart — she postdates the 2014 reset entirely. She is also, notably, one of the first openly queer leads in mainstream Star Wars publishing, and her romantic history is central to her stories rather than incidental to them.
Reading note
If you have been told the comics are optional, Aphra is the counter-argument. Start with Gillen's Darth Vader run, then the first Aphra volume, and note that both are structured as heist fiction rather than war fiction.
