Ton Phanan is a human male pilot and one of the founding members of Wraith Squadron in Aaron Allston’s X-Wing: Wraith Squadron (Bantam Spectra, 1998), the fifth novel in the series and the one that changed what the X-Wing books were.
The squadron was created by Wedge Antilles out of pilots who were about to be discharged — psychologically and emotionally battered people with commando skills the New Republic could not otherwise buy. Phanan is the medical case in a unit full of them, kept flying by cybernetic replacement after cybernetic replacement, and the running joke about how much of him is still original is the darkest thing in a very funny book.
His partnership with Face Loran is the emotional centre of the first Wraith novel. Two men who perform for a living — one a former child propaganda star, one a former doctor with a bottomless line in bleak wit — spend the book making each other laugh, and the reader is being set up for something the whole time.
Phanan is Star Wars Legends. He is the reason readers who came up on the Wraith books talk about them the way they do, and he is why the comedy in those novels has never read as weightless.
