Visit Strange New Worlds In Byrne Star Trek Omnibus
By Dan BrownFew comic creators do Star Trek as well as industry legend and sometime Canadian John Byrne. That thought entered my head as I was watching a recent episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Have you been following the show? I think this summer’s second season is much stronger than the first.Indeed, it’s a Golden Age on the small screen for Star Trek fans, who now have several series to choose from, including the workplace comedy Lower Decks, the recently concluded third season of Picard, the just-axed Prodigy, and the unwatched-by-me Discovery.SNW, which features doomed Captain Christopher Pike, offers a fresh twist on established Trek continuity. As we know from the original series, Pike has a tragedy waiting for him in his future, but SNW sets that premise on its ear by positing that Pike knows he is in for a world of hurt.One of the other characters from SNW – the Enterprise’s Number One – is fleshed out in an anthology published in 2014 by IDW, which contains four interconnected stories Byrne drew and wrote. If Star Trek excites you, I recommend you hunt it down.I would put Star Trek: The John Byrne Collection at the top of the heap as far as Trek comic adaptations – of which there have been many over the decades – go.My suspicion is that Byrne, famed for his work on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four and Superman, had very specific stories in mind for his stint at IDW. (I honestly don’t know if he approached the publisher with a pitch, or if IDW asked the illustrator/writer to create the comics that make up this collection.) Reading the hefty volume, I get the sense Byrne is a huge Star Trek fan and knew exactly what he wanted to do, including putting the spotlight on Pike’s second-in-command. And, for the record, the Number One in SNW follows an entirely different path from the comic character, so I doubt the show’s creators read the Byrne compilation before SNW launched, which is fine by me since I can’t get enough of her in either medium.The Byrne treasury also offers an intriguing look at another minor character from the original show, Gary Seven. If I remember my Gene Roddenberry lore correctly, he aimed to have the mysterious and powerful Seven star in his own show. Byrne offers a tantalizing glimpse at what such a program might have looked like, had Roddenberry’s ambitions been realized. Byrne also sheds light on the inner workings of the Romulan homeworld, where the spheres of politics and romance are indistinguishable. And what Trek fan could resist a storyline with the title Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor? Being just a humble country doctor doesn’t make his adventures in deep space any less compelling. Another anthology I read this summer is 2009’s Star Trek: Mission’s End. I prefer Byrne’s clean lines to Steven Molnar’s art, but the real reason to grab this trade paperback is the writing by Canada’s own Ty Templeton, who was given the daunting task of bridging the gap between the original series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.In other words, Templeton had to explain why Kirk takes the desk assignment as an admiral that he is so ambivalent about at the beginning of the first Trek movie, why McCoy quits the Enterprise (you’ll recall he has to be drafted by Starfleet to join Kirk before they investigate V’Ger’s march toward Earth), and what led Spock to depart for Vulcan to get more in touch with his logical side. One other item on my summer reading list is Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs Volume One and Two, which harken back to the very earliest era of Star Trek in comics form back in the Gold Key days. I think it’s fair to say these earliest imaginings of Trek on the page are, well, a mixed bag. Sure, each issue was about Kirk and company, but I’m pretty sure they were written and drawn by individuals who hadn’t actually seen the show on TV. This leads to some inadvertent comedy, as when Scottish Enterprise engineer Montgomery Scott is depicted as having blond hair.Heck, the artist or artists (Gold Key had a policy of not including credits in these comics) didn’t even put the Starfleet logo on the crew’s uniforms!Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
