I’ve been reading Star Wars comics for as long as I can remember, from the original Marvel run, through Darkhorse, and now back to Marvel again. There’s been a lot of comics-only characters that I wanted in figure form over the years, (Jaxxon, Valance, A’sharad Hett, Vilmarh Grahrk, and Spiker to name a few), so it’s very exciting to get one of my new comic favorites in the Black Series line. Let’s take a look at Black Series Doctor Aphra!
Doctor Aphra brings a bit of a new flavor to the Star Wars universe as she is an archaeologist, though an unscrupulous one who uses her education to raid ancient intergalactic temples and tombs for profit. She was originally introduced in the Darth Vader book, but has gone on to star in her own comic.
Aphra comes in the standard box with the big window and classy artwork and she comes with a blaster and a removeable cap. The blaster is similar to Han Solo’s DL-44 and that makes sense since they re-used it from the Jaina Solo figure from a while back. It’s nicely detailed and fits well in the holster.
The hat is sort of Aphra’s signature piece of clothing and it’s very sharply sculpted with nice texture detail. The hat is cast in soft plastic and fits securely on the head and scales well, which is not always the case with removeable head gear.
The only thing I would have liked that would improve it was if the goggles had translucent lenses. I think they would have had to have been separate pieces for that to work.
The sculpt is really nice and most of it is re-used parts from the aforementioned Jaina Solo figure with new arms, head, cap, and vest.
The nice thing about all the Jaina re-used is that you can swap their accessories if you want.
The vest is also removeable, but she looks a little awkward without it.
I also really like the portrait and it works well as a more realistic version of a character that I’m used to see illustrated in a less realistic style.
Aphra has the following articulation:
- Swivel/hinge neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and ankles
- Double hinged knees
- Single hinged lower torso
- Ball and socket head and upper torso
- Swivel thigh
I had some stuck joints with Aphra out of the box and after breaking Ezra I decided to not take any more chances with these figures and gave her a warm water soak to loosen up the stuck hip swivel and ankle hinge.
Once freed up, the joints work well for the most part. The ball and socket in the head doesn’t really allow any tilt, it’s too tight for that, but the upper torso has very good movement. I really like the lower torso hinge/upper torso ball and socket combo for posing. The elbow only gets a 90 degree bend, which is a little disappointing for the newer Hasbro figures, but not awful. I also would have preferred an up/down wrist hinge for her gun hand rather than the in/out hinge it comes with.
The paint is pretty nice. The face has an effective photo-real process and the body has a couple of nice washes to bring out the detail on the clothes. One paint issue I noticed is that in some light, you can really see how the shirt is three slightly different colors.
Overall, Aphra is an excellent figure. The sculpt is an effective translation of the comic character into the Black Series style and the parts re-use is cleverly handled. It’s very exciting to get characters from other Star Wars media outside of the films, so I hope they keep doing that in the future.
