2019: Endings and All That…
Cover art by Ashley Witter
Part 1 of 2
Doctor Aphra
It’s been a Winter of endings here at the Spursphere. Professionally speaking, I mean.
By the grace of my own most overused writerly aphorism it’s therefore also been a month of beginnings. Or, as a less dainty hack might put it, Endless Fucking Pitches.
Mind you, the grinding wheels of all publishing machines begin to get clogged with speculative holiday road-grit weeks before the festive crunch descends - whereupon Editorial Santa must harness the mopey reindeer of overtime - so it’ll likely be a while before I know how many of these beginnings will ever actually, y’know, begin. If any.
2020 may be ludicrously busy, or - being positive - I might finally get some sleep.
For now, let’s satisfy ourselves doing as the dark and pagan gods of the season demand, and really wail and gnash our teeth over what’s been lost. Prepare then, friends, to sacrifice your young Sun King, for the nights grow long and the booze grows moorish, and none can truly say what dawn shall bring.
Herein: some thoughts on Ending An Ongoing.
Doctor Aphra was the first IP to fall off my slate since Coda wrapped earlier this year. I took the helm on this strange, dark, ridiculous little spin-off-of-a-spin-off at issue 15, full of gratitude to comrade Gillen for passing the baton.
For all the doomy prognostications of Star Wars Fans Of A Particular Type, it’s lasted forty - FORTY - issues, plus a smattering of annuals and crossovers, in this first run alone (it will relaunch in the post-Empire Strikes Back chronology of Marvel’s phase 2 books in 2020 with a new creative team).
That’s an insanely, improbably, wildly brilliant success story for any comic today, far less one about a treacherous space lesbian who can’t decide whether she’s amoral or immoral. I’m not saying anyone who claims otherwise probably has an axe to grind about, oh, say, All These Lame Female Characters Getting Up In My Fandom With Their Unrealistic Cleverness And Their Lack Of A Cleavage and Their Totally Unrepresentative Gayness Goddammit This Isn’t What REAL Stars Warring Is About...
...but I’m not not saying it. You know?
Could Aphra have continued, all else being equal? I honestly don’t know. Sales numbers were still comfortably within profitable margins, from what little I understand of the whole arcane business. (Wherever it truly lies, the mythical Lower Cut-Off Threshold for the Big-2 books is still an enviably long way above the highest bedpost-notches of other publishers’ titles.)
No book ever ends selling more units than it did when it began, you know? Every boxer ends their career on the mat. You either die a hero or live long enough to yadda yadda yadda. So it goes, Billy Pilgrim.
But it’s nice that I never had to find out whether we could keep grinding away until we outstayed our welcome. Whether I could keep spinning yarns or if the ideas would dry up.
The entire SW line reached its natural chapter-turn beat, now the chronology shifts onwards. Aphra throws a parting bon mot at her latest group of left-behind associates -- perhaps, in the end, just a little less glib than usual -- and disappears into the void.
It was time.
Interior art by Emilio Laiso
Interior art by Caspar Wijngaard
Interior art by Kev Walker
Do I have more Star Wars in me? Absolutely, yes. Do I have more Aphra…? Maybe? But I’m not sad -- well, not regretful -- to be winding-up. I told the story I set out to tell, and many others beside. I wrote (as far as any of us know) Star Wars’s first canoncial gay kiss (and implied its first gay sex). I created an interspecies married couple of monster hunters. I exploded lots and lots of tooka cats.
I worked with a spinning revolver-barrel of incredible artists (standouts include Elsa Charretier, my old Angelic droog Caspar Wijngaard, and the legendary Kev Walker -- but frankly I’ve been spoiled by all the collaborators along the way).
I’m indebted to Heather Antos and Jordan White, who first brought me aboard, and to Mark Paniccia and Tom Gronemann for keeping a whole crockery-cupboard’s worth of plates spinning. And of course to Kieron, whose brainchild our beloved, disastrous, dumpster-fire of an adventuress was.
So long, Chelli. It’s been a hoot.
Tomorrow: let’s talk about The Dreaming. And, y’know. Depression. The fun stuff.