Category: Star Trek

By David Brin & Scott Hampton (WildStorm)
ISBN 1-84023-421-0

The Star Trek franchise has had many comic book homes. This effort published by DC/WildStorm is set during the period when Deep Space 9 was being broadcast and tangentially informs the season storyline that featured an intergalactic war between the Federation and its Alpha Quadrant allies on one side and the J’em Haddar warriors of The Dominion on the other.

As the Dominion war rages the USS Enterprise is being used for diplomatic service. Whilst delivering an ambassador to a quarantine sector where an alien race has been embargoed for fifty years the ship intercepts a random Transporter beam heading directly towards the sun of the Palami race.

After serving only half their sentence of interstellar Coventry, the Palami, who had created a plague that decimated the galaxy’s population have demanded a meeting with Federation Authorities, and to be allowed access beyond their system once more.

Tensions are high aboard the Starfleet vessel. This is the wrong time to be fighting another enemy, especially one so proficient in creating bio-weapons, so the added complication caused by the transporter beam’s passenger bodes nothing but trouble.

Fifty years before the official invention of teleport technology a dedicated Earth scientist almost made a commercial go of the revolutionary discovery. He was thwarted by vested travel and shipping interests, betrayed by his own staff and threatened by religious fundamentalists. On the very brink of snatching victory from his near-defeat, a tremendous explosion destroyed his lab and he passed, forgotten, into history. More than two hundred years later he is reintegrated by the Enterprise science staff as the beam continues on towards the sun.

The brinksmanship between Federation and Palami continues as Data and Dr. Crusher pursue radical methods to solve the mystery of the ancient – amnesiac – Earthman. But when they do it’s only to discover that the beam had another passenger. If they are to rescue that other traveller in time and space they will have to break the tense face-off with the dreaded Palami…

David Brin has crafted a solid tale of cold-war tension and personal drama bewitchingly painted by Scott Hampton. Sheer delight, not only for franchise-followers, but also SF fans and art-and-story lovers too.

©2001 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

By Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta & Igor Kordey (WildStorm)
ISBN 1-56389-754-7

The Star Trek franchise has had many comic book homes. This effort published by DC/WildStorm is set during the period when Deep Space 9 was being broadcast and tangentially informs the seasons-long storyline that featured an intergalactic war between the Federation and its Alpha Quadrant allies on one side and the J’em Haddar warriors of The Dominion on the other.

The Gorn are an aggressive civilisation of Reptiles who appeared in an episode of the original 1960s TV show. It was an adaptation of a classic SF short story by Fred Brown entitled “Arena”, in which Captain Kirk and his Gorn opposite number are selected by a super-advanced race to represent their species in a duel for galactic supremacy. The loser race would be curbed to avoid horrendous and bloody space-war.

A century later the Federation is at war with the Dominion and desperate for allies. Jean-Luc Picard has been dispatched to the Gorn planet to broker an alliance, but the USS Enterprise arrives just as the reptile’s Warrior Caste stages a bloody coup and launches an all-out attack on neighbouring worlds. The way in which Picard, Riker, and all the Next Generation stalwarts act to quell the uprising won’t just dictate how the humans and reptiles will co-exist in the future, it might well decide if they exist at all…

Although not to everybody’s taste, and despite a certain rough hesitancy in Igor Kordey’s fully painted artwork, not to mention a somewhat perfunctory script, this tale does rattle along in the manner Star Trek fans would hope for, and even casual readers will come away with a sense of expectation fulfilled.

© 2000 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

 

By Michael Jan Friedman & Pablo Marcos (Titan Books)
ISBN 1-94576- 318-1

Titan’s reprinting (issues #13-18 of the DC series from the 1990s) of the venerable TV phenomenon continues with Michael Jan Friedman scripting capable if uninspiring comics tales illustrated by veteran Pablo Marcos, and guest artists and writers Dave Stern, Mike O’Brien, Ken Penders, Mike Manley and Robert Campanella also contributing to the licensed fun.

Friedman’s adventures involve an elaborate plot by telepaths to use the crew to assassinate delegates at a peace conference, a plot by the Ferengi to illegally strip-mine a resort world, starring Riker and LaForge, and a stellar phenomenon that draws the Enterprise into a confrontation with the Romulans just as a plague of madness grips the crew. The fill-in is another “time-traveller back to fix the continuum” tale as Wesley Crusher’s attempts to improve the Transporter system go awry.

Although not the best work these creators have produced, the stories are honest entertainment that should be a welcome treat for fans and they are easily accessible to anyone who has seen the TV show

™ & © 2006 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

By various (Titan Books)
ISBN: 1-84576-084-0

As the live action segment of the monolithic fantasy brand ended once again, the ancillary merchandising machine swung inexorably into action to provide succour to all the stunned and hungry aficionados as they gathered, organised and restarted the campaign for its inevitable return.

For comic fans this is not such a bad thing since the show has spawned a number of comic-book tie-ins over the decades, and many of these are really rather good. Case in point being DC Comics’ early 1980s tandem series featuring not only the then new and risky venture Star Trek: The Next Generation, but also the much more canny proposition of a comic-book series featuring the original characters in adventures set in the aftermath of the film The Wrath of Khan.

To Boldly Go collects the first six issues of that series and starts off in rattling fashion with the destruction of a Federation Starship at the hands of those villainous Klingons, necessitating the dispatch of the Enterprise to thwart whatever new secret weapon the rogues have this time. With nary a breath to spare it escalates the Galactic Cold War into an interplanetary conflict involving the Excalbians and Organians. You probably don’t know who they are and don’t need to. The fans do and casual readers are kept fully in the loop by the accessible and capable scripting of Mike W. Barr.

This romp is swiftly followed by the more traditional tale of a Star Fleet officer who goes native and breaks the Prime Directive, and the volume ends with an intriguing thriller featuring a diplomatic mission and a metamorphic assassin. Solid entertaining stuff, capably and seamlessly illustrated by the brilliant and much missed Tom Sutton, with inking from Ricardo Villagran and Sal Amendola, the only fly in the ointment is a fearsomely coarse printer’s dot-screen that makes some pages look as if they’re being viewed from inside a stocking mask – and no, I’m not telling you how I know that. Use your imagination.

I’m always banging on about getting more people into reading comics, and this sort of material is one of the easiest and most efficient methods. Quality material that needs waste no space on back-story is our most valuable commodity, and one we should be happy to support and extol.

® & © 2005 Paramount Pictures All Rights Reserved.

 

By Michael Jan Friedman & Pablo Marcos (Titan Books)
ISBN 1-84576-153-7

Readable reprinting (issues #1-5 of the ongoing DC series from 1989) of the now-venerated TV phenomenon originally published in tandem with the further adventures of the original Star Trek franchise with novelist Michael Jan Friedman scripting and capable if uninspiring comics veteran Pablo Marcos illustrating characters which were still new to those oh-so unforgiving TV audiences.

The stories themselves are no great shakes, and certainly – at this stage – no rival to the comics starring the original series characters (also available from Titan in a companion series). The crew busy themselves dealing with an away mission that leads to Captain Picard being accused of murder (‘Return to Raimon’ & ‘Murder Most Foul’), a rite of passage for a anxious neophyte crewman (‘Derelict’ & ‘The Hero Factor’) and a lost love (Geordi LaForge’s this time) who has become an evil monster (‘Serafin’s Survivors’).

Happily, there is a marked improvement even between the first and last stories in the book, and later volumes have some genuine treats in store for both the dedicated fanatic and comic readers in general.

™ & © 2005 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.