By Ryan North, Chris Fenoglio, Johanna Nattalie, Jake Wood & various (Idea & Design Works)
ISBN: 978-1-684059-62-1 (TPB), 978-1-649361-14-1 (Digital edition)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: And Lo! A Silly New star Appeared in an Already Pretty Crowded firmament …8/10
You can generally tell how much you love something by how able you are to laugh at and with it/they/them. Don’t take my word for it, you can just ask your life partner/cat/pub quiz teammates/fellow trolls before rocking and reeling in their revelations…
Star Trek debuted on US televisions on September 8th 1966, running until June 3rd 1969: three seasons comprising 79 episodes. Many of them were quite funny.
A moderate success, the series only really became popular after going into syndication, where it ran constantly in local TV regions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was also sold all over the world, popping up seemingly everywhere and developing quite a devoted fanbase. Being a third world country, Britain didn’t see the show until July 12th 1969, during the rocket fever surrounding the Apollo moon landings. BBC One screened “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in black-&-white before proceeding to broadcast the rest of the series in the wrong order. “Arena” was the first episode screened in colour (November 15th 1969), but viewers didn’t care. We were all hooked anyway and many of the show’s catchphrases – quite a few erroneous and some entirely fictitious – swiftly and indelibly entered the popular lexicon of the nation.
As well as a wealth of US comic books and Japanese manga from various licensees, The Original Series spawned a British-originated comic strip which ran (from the end of the 1960s well into the 1970s) in Joe 90, TV21 and TV21 and Valiant. These have also been collected and I’ll get to them in the fullness of time and space.
Back in the USA, after that slow start the show became an overwhelming and influential fan-driven phenomenon. The original cast returned in a film franchise and the core concept was repeatedly expanded upon with a wealth of spin-off franchises and formats such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and many others. Books, comics, games and more movies expanded the mythology, as did a steady stream of small screen series and shows… and now it’s been sixty years!
Irreverent, inventive and utterly mired in all the established continuity ever, a fully animated series aimed at what we will kindly call adults was created by writer/producer/showrunner Mike McMahan (Golden Axe, Solar Opposites, Rick and Morty, Drawn Together, South Park) and aired between August 6th 2020 and December 2024 – 50 episodes across five seasons.
Star Trek: Lower Decks was the ninth conceptual iteration of the all-encompassing brand and is the funniest of all of them. It was also popular enough to generate a crossover with current flagship series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I’m not going to be the guy who proselytises and bleats on, pointedly explaining why it’s the best. If you’ve seen it, you know I’m right and if you haven’t yet I’m still right and you need to buck your ideas up…
Today we’re taking a timely look at the first graphic novel compilation gathering the material from #1-3 of IDW’s 2023 comic book spin-off.
What you might as well know as you’re all here anyway: Star Trek: Lower Decks details the fraught, frantic and often self-inflicted lives of some of the support crew and junior ranks of Federation starship Cerritos in the late 24th century, specifically following a motley crew of friends as they pursue career advancement. Captained by competent yet deeply unfulfilled Captain Carol Freeman, Cerritos is a second-contact vessel, a fleet workhorse following up and doing all the admin, actual deliveries and promise-keeping after glamour boys like Kirk, Picard or Will Riker have done all the gladhanding, scoffed all the banquets, thrashed the covert baddies and scandalised all the conservative element by canoodling with any available space hotties…
The ship’s senior officers include testosterone-addicted, iron-pumping himbo First Officer Jack Ransom; excitable Bajoran-born security chief Shaxs and aging foul-mouthed feline (Caitian) chief medical officer T’Ana, but our main focus is the daily lives of those they are training for succession and even eventual command.
Most prominent – or at least loudest and most disruptive – is resolutely rebel rule-breaker Beckett Mariner (and Captain Freeman’s intransigent daughter); ambitious, anxious career-obsessed super-suck-up Brad Boimler; sweetly inoffensive Orion pirate-princess-turned-science-geek D’Vana Tendi and cyborg engineering nerd Sam Rutherford, who all bunk together in the bowels of the ship while seeking promotion, recognition, extra sleep, fun and no more scutwork…
They are all convinced that they have seen everything there is to see but despite that – and the repetitive menial tasks – are all honestly devout and sworn to uphold the tenets of the multi-species United Federation of Planets… even if they’re stuck on (one of) Starfleet’s least important ships…
Written by Ryan North (How To Take Over The World, How To Invent Everything, Slaughterhouse-Five, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Dinosaur Comics) and illustrated by Chris Fenoglio (Star Wars, Batman: The Animated Series, Goosebumps, X-Files), this star-date’s tale starts ‘All in a Sea of Wonders’ as just another case of the awe-inspiring bridge crew mediating a ceasefire between two species who hate each other leads to Cerritos being despatched to the Qvanti system; an odd civilisation that developed starflight rather late in their development and therefore are simultaneous classified as highly-advanced and primitive at the same time…
Meanwhile on a holodeck and enjoying their well-earned down-time, Mariner, Tendi and Rutherford are trying to enjoy Boimler’s latest fully-immersive fantasy show-plays. Typically, as they roam solid-light smog-filled streets in “19th century London”, they review the so-very-large record of holodeck disasters, AI escapes and universal menaces accidently brought to life and unleashed by meddling with sensibly in place programs.
Naturally, gleefully disruptive Mariner just can’t help herself and as Cerritos hits an undefinable energy field generated by the enigmatic Qvanti, she resets holodeck safety protocols and character parameters. Soon a shockingly smart sentient is aware, seductively refined, coolly likeable, incredibly impatient to see the worlds beyond his eyes. Calculatedly cunning Count Dracula is loose amongst them, with all his powers of shapeshifting, elemental manipulation, cloak-waving, heavy-metal rock guitar solos, mind control, counting scarily and laughing sinisterly…
At least the light-impaler can’t drink actual blood or turn his victims into undead thralls… oh wait, once he upgrades himself, Vlad can do that too…
When Dracula emerges amongst the rest of the crew and then down to the Qvanti homeworld – where the veteran Bridge crew are enduring major problems resulting from bad briefing notes, poor communication and smug overconfident assumptions – it’s the end of at least one world as we know it. With Dracula loose in two different Qvanti populations both spending all their time trying to eradicate the interfering Starfleet busybodies, it all gets quite complicated very soon, and it’s time for Beckett to get creative and break something again…
As is the nature of these things, each individual episode was accompanied by themed extras and that augmented at the end by a gallery of covers and variants by Fenoglio, Troy Little, Derek Charm, Philip Murphy and Robby Cook, plus some smart use of TV show standbys.
‘Badgey Explains it All…’ reveals sly “callbacks” scattered throughout the tale which invoke and reference assorted Trek lore onscreen appearances from the other eight incarnations, whilst ‘Rutherford’s Holodeck Hangout!’ details other Holodeck alumni. The way Fenoglio brought North’s script to life (non-holodeck-ily) is deconstructed in an Art Process feature which is supported by a beseeching and beguiling ‘Travel to Qvanti’ brochure and chance to ‘Experience Dracula’s Castle’.
These are supported in our Post-Scarcity Federation by ads helpful reminders of what can be materialised with the right commands to the ‘Cerritos Food Replicators’ – specialities like Warp 5 Nachos, Elote and Vegan, cruelty-free Strawberry Dracquiris! We offer a peek at ‘Dracula’s Art Gallery’, his personal reflections on Anna Karenina, other ways to enjoy Qvanti tourism plus an outworld late look at The New York Comic Con Lower Decks mural and even more outrageous in-universe silliness & shenanigans…
Dedicated to taking itself not at all seriously, Star Trek Lower Decks is an utter delight in comics as much as on screen. Boldly go there now if you badly need a vicarious voyage of discovery and to giggle where no being has giggled before…
STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS May 2023 ™ & © CBS Studios Inc. Star Trek and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.