Chelli Lona Aphra arrived in 2015 as a gag: what if Indiana Jones were a war criminal with two murder droids? Kieron Gillen and Simon Spurrier ran that joke for forty issues and it never quite stopped being a joke. The 2020 relaunch is the first version of the character that is genuinely frightening, and the reason is that Alyssa Wong takes her wants seriously.
Ensemble, not solo
The structural move is to surround Aphra with people who are not disposable. Sana Starros, Just Lucky, Detta Yao, Ariole Yu — the supporting cast turns the book into a heist ensemble, and heist ensembles run on trust, which is the one currency Aphra cannot produce. Every arc is built out of that mismatch. She assembles a crew, the crew becomes something like a family, and she sells them out, and this time the book makes you feel it.
The Spark Eternal
The run's centre of gravity is the arc in which an ancient intelligence takes up residence in Aphra's head. It is a horror story about a woman whose defining trait is that she will do anything, meeting something that will make her do anything. Minkyu Jung's art through this stretch is the best work in the run — expressive, mobile, unwilling to let a single reaction shot go to waste.
The crossover tax
Fifteen of these forty issues are tie-ins to War of the Bounty Hunters, Crimson Reign or Dark Droids. The Aphra book absorbs that better than its siblings do, because a character who is always chasing somebody else's treasure is easy to drop into somebody else's plot. Even so, the final Dark Droids stretch is where the series is most obviously serving the machine rather than itself.
Verdict
It ends on 31 January 2024 with Aphra roughly where she started and completely changed, which is the correct ending for this character and a harder trick than it sounds. If you only read one Aphra run, read this one.
