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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The Seeds of Salvation TPB (Review)
Christine Chapel leads a rescue mission into an ancient prison hidden beneath the frozen world of Poilant in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The Seeds of Salvation. Robbie Thompson delivers a thoughtful horror-flavoured Star Trek adventure with strong character work, impressive artwork, and a satisfying Trek conclusion, even if a mid-book art change and a few familiar tropes stop it short of greatness.
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The Art of Star Trek & Defiant — The Bright and The Stolen Ships
Flip from the Star Trek half of this book to the Defiant half and you can feel the temperature drop. One minute you are looking at Ramón Rosanas’s clean, sunlit bridges, the kind of art that makes the 24th century look like somewhere you would actually want to live. The next you are in Ángel Unzueta’s painted murk, where a crew of rogues aboard a stolen ship glower out of the shadows like they have somewhere worse to be. The Art of Star Trek & Defiant collects two years of comics that ran side by side, and the cleverest thing about it is that it never once pretends they were the same show.
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Star Trek: The Mirror War — Emperor Riker and the Long Road to Earning It
The premise of The Mirror War has almost everything going for it on paper. The TNG crew, transplanted to the Mirror Universe. Captain Picard not as the man who reads archaeology and quotes Plutarch, but as an Imperial officer building an armada to drag the Terran Empire back from the edge of extinction. It should be irresistible. The question, after sitting with this collected edition for a while, is whether the execution lives up to what the concept promises. The answer is mostly yes. The caveats are where things get interesting.
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The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks — The Work Behind the Cerritos
There is a row of Shaxs designs in this book that never made it to screen. A purple, troll-ish thing. A rounder one, closer to a bear or a koala. A scaled, lizardy variant that looks like it strayed in from a different show entirely. The grizzled Bajoran we ended up with is plainly the right call, but the pleasure of an art book like this is getting to stand in the room before that call was made. Tendi gets a quieter version of the same treatment a few pages earlier, a turnaround sketched and resketched with the designers’ own notes scrawled across it, smaller head, smaller eyes, redraw, each pass nudging her toward the character who finally reads as Tendi. That gap between a good idea and the final version is the most interesting thing in the whole book. Having written, lettered, and now and then coloured comics myself over the years, it’s the part I always go looking for.
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Star Trek: Holo-ween — A Halloween Special That Earns Its Ridiculous Premise
Star Trek has always been willing to try horror. The follow-through is another matter. “Catspaw” dressed up a base-under-siege story in Halloween trappings and lost the tone somewhere in the second act. “Wolf in the Fold” gave us a serial killer mystery and a villain genuinely disturbing enough to stick around, if anyone ever thought to bring him back. IDW thought to bring him back.
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Star Trek: Red Shirts — A Graphic Novel That Diagnoses Its Own Problem
There’s a moment early in Star Trek: Red Shirts where the security team is loaded into torpedo casings and fired at a planet. The team inside stare out in terror, crammed into modified casings with little more than life support and a prayer, while the U.S.S. Warren follows up with two live torpedoes to knock the target antenna offline. It’s a brisk, vicious image, and it tells you exactly what kind of book you’re holding before the first casualty lands. These people are already equipment. The comic knows it, and it wants you to know it too.
