See, Aphra is one of those things where you can see the seed of a good idea slowly rot away.
Her initial introduction was... a bit tongue in cheek but not too bad - it's only natural to want to cross over Indiana Jones & Star Wars (been done once before). So he's a chick now? Ok, actually not a bad chance considering they also made this rule63 version "evil" so the sex swap ended up being the least big change about her. The problem is rather than have her keep calm and collected and professional (you know, like Indiana Jones DOES - except in extreme circumstances) they increasingly turned her "quirky" and made her "autistic" which just ruined the joke.
Then there are the murder droids...
Don't get me wrong, I of course had ever reason to love these - they are literally Threepio & Artoo painted black (
make the jokes you want here), the problem is they turned them into 1 note jokes AND tried to keep them evil. "Tee hee, 000 just tortured a doctor to death - that lovable scamp." (of course it was always done off screen) I mean even I know to keep "kill all humans" to a modest running gag and not reference "kill all humans" in every paragraph of "killing all humans" in every post that I make on this "kill all humans" website. No joke - that is seriously what it is like to watch the droids in this thing.
Here's the other thing: Artoo just does NOT translate to a silent medium. In the movies, he remains delightful because his sounds are varied to avoid a rut and his movements are very expressible. In a comic book, "beep - boop" cannot be as varied nor can you have the robot "act" in still frames. I mean, with a human shaped figure, readers can look from one panel to another and mentally map out the movements because they are familiar with them and thus infer a lot from the stilled body language. R2-D2 is a literal trash-can shaped swiss army knife. Part of the fun in the movies is seeing what new thing would pop out of him next. But humans have no real reference point for how the movement works in real life (because of the nature of movie watching) so the illusion of a well-stocked robot pal doesn't work as well on the page.
Half of this applies to the Chewbacca knock-off as well. (literally colored black, LITERALLY wearing an eye patch)
The author could have greatly improved things had they took the opportunity to more fully embrace the differences. Like having the weapon-loaded R2 knockoff speak very eloquently - even upper class while the 3P0 knock-off was like Groot, repeating a phrase or word that the R2 would translate. And then have the Chewie replacement be like... what if it was a gungan? A bad ass gungan? Or maybe instead of a big, furry, silent type, he was a Watto alien - small, hairless, and talkative. Just fully embrace the flip side of it all. Or what if the robots actually managed to usurp the organics and were leading a murderous rampage?
But no, we just had to take the Star Wars cast and go "but what if they were evil?" Only it's not
really evil, but more like... "religious movie" evil where they're just rude. Sometimes. Anything actually bad is done off screen. I mean, I don't know why I'm surprised about this from Disney, you just wish if they were going to commit to the bit, they wouldn't like... publish a Darth Vader comic in the first place!
And the Darth Vader comic seems to be the one where they actually TRIED.
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