Marvel launched two Star Wars ongoings in 2015. The other one had John Cassaday, the marketing and the cover of every retailer catalogue. This one had a title character who does not speak for pages at a time, and it is the one people still argue about.
The problem it solves
Darth Vader is a closed book by design. He has no interior monologue in the films, no confidants, and an ending everybody already knows. Kieron Gillen's answer is to stop trying to get inside him and instead write everyone who has to stand near him. Inspector Thanoth investigates him. Cylo builds replacements for him. The Emperor humiliates him in front of General Tagge. We learn what Vader is by watching the shape of the hole he leaves in other people's plans.
The plot engine is beautifully cynical: after Yavin the Emperor has publicly demoted his apprentice, so Vader assembles an off-books crew — a rogue archaeologist, two murder droids, Black Krrsantan — and runs private operations against his own Empire while pretending to be a good soldier. It is a heist comic in which the mark is the Galactic Empire and the thief is its second-most powerful man.
Doctor Aphra
Chelli Lona Aphra arrives in issue #3 and reorganises the book around herself. She is a genuinely new thing in Star Wars: not a rebel, not a soldier, not secretly noble. She is a working archaeologist with a doctorate, a talent for weaponised droids and an instinct for self-preservation that she mistakes for a personality. Gillen and Larroca gave her BT-1 and 0-0-0 as a black-mirror C-3PO and R2-D2, and the joke lands because it is not only a joke — the protocol droid built for torture is exactly what the setting's cuteness looks like from the Empire's side.
She is also where the run's limits show. Aphra is so much livelier than the Rebel cast that the book keeps handing her the plot, and by End of Games her survival is the only genuine suspense left in a series about a man we have watched die. That she went on to headline forty issues of her own is the correct verdict on the character and a quiet criticism of the book that could not contain her.
Larroca
Salvador Larroca's photo-referenced likenesses are the single most divisive choice in modern Star Wars comics, and the objection is fair: faces sit slightly outside the drawing, actors freeze mid-expression, crowd scenes go glassy. What is less often conceded is how well it serves this particular book. Vader has no face. He is a shape, and Larroca draws shapes and armour and machinery with real weight. The Shu-Torun sequences — molten industry, ore-baron heraldry, a teenage queen on a throne of her murdered family — are among the best-looking pages Marvel's licence has produced.
Verdict
It is airless in the way all canon prequels are airless: nothing here can matter enough to alter The Empire Strikes Back. Gillen turns that constraint into the subject. Vader cannot win, cannot lose and cannot leave, so the run is about how a man of enormous power spends twenty-five issues fighting for permission to keep being what he already is. Start at #1. Do not skip the annual.
