Star Wars: Doctor Aphra — Chaos Agent
The Empire may have fallen, but Doctor Chelli Aphra is still up to her old tricks. Which is how she winds up in the custody of the New Republic’s Department of Artifacts and Archive Goods Retrieval, a.k.a. Daggers, after a botched job. While the department’s head is inclined to ship Aphra out to a mining colony, none other than Luke Skywalker shows up with a better suggestion: Have Aphra put her unique set of skills to use for the Daggers. He even volunteers to stick around for a bit to help keep her on the straight and narrow. This is how Aphra winds up working for the New Republic. As for how long that’ll last, well, who can really say?
Even if it told a complete story, the fact that the most recent “Star Wars” series only lasted for ten issues can only be seen as a disappointment given the 75 and 50-issue runs of the previous titles. Aphra’s own ongoing series lasted for much longer than this one, but “Chaos Agent” doesn’t give off the feeling that it was an aborted attempt to give the character a third one. Rather, it feels like a victory lap following her previous successes that allows her to team up with not just Luke, but Han Solo, Chewbacca, and (very briefly) Leia.
Cherish Chen wrote all five issues here and they’re all solid adventure stories with some twists and fun character moments. She could’ve based the entire volume on Aphra having adventures with Luke and/or Han, based on how well she writes them, but I degrees. There’s an ongoing thread about how the title character dislikes working within the confines of the Republic (or authority in general) that leads to a surprising addition to her history, yet the stories told here can all stand on their own. Gabriel Guzman provides the art for the first three issues, and his is the best work here; though, Kieran McEown and Steven Cummings turn in decent work in the final two. It’s all enough to make me wish that Aphra’s adventures within the Daggers had gone on a little longer, even if what we got is a fine finale for her story so far.