Continuity Chaos!!!

The original cast film-era comics and their vicissitudes

In a previous post, I suggested I might write a post on some of the old Star Trek comics if there was interest. There was, so here we are. I spent an enjoyable couple hours this morning digging back through the series to make sure I had my facts straight about an exceptionally convoluted course of events. It also occurred to me that readers might welcome some screen shots, and then it occurred to me that that would be the kind of thing I might do if I were inviting people to pay for subscriptions. In any case, you can get a good feel for the series, which is available via (ahem) “various means,” by browsing this cover gallery. If I wind up getting a rash of pledges, I may undertake more labor-intensive posts—including an even deeper dive into these comics if it comes to it! But in the meantime, I only ask that you consider supporting my work by pre-ordering my book.

The series I am going to discuss today is the first run of Star Trek comics with DC, which ran from 1984 to 1988. It is not the first ever run of Star Trek comics, which have been published by various companies since The Original Series first aired. The first run, by the UK publisher Golden Key, is famously misguided—the creators were given only minimal information about the show, which was not airing in the UK, and made glaring errors like putting Captain “Kurt” in command. The first “real,” professional-quality series was published by Marvel in the wake of The Motion Picture, and featured some scripts originally written for the proposed Phase II TV revival. The whole Marvel run is available in a nice omnibus collection put out by IDW, which is widely available used. I would characterize the stories as fine but forgettable.

It was only with the initial DC run that Star Trek comics really came into their own in my opinion. Where the Marvel run was hobbled by licensing restrictions that only allowed them to use concepts from The Motion Picture, DC had free rein over every aspect of franchise lore. It also had the advantage of following up on the much more successful Wrath of Khan, which more or less single-handedly saved the franchise after the first movie flopped. The writers decided to build on that momentum by setting the series immediately after Wrath of Khan, with Saavik filling the slot left open by Spock’s death. Though she is mostly a background character, a memorable two-part arc (#7-8) has her hijack a shuttle to fulfill the urges of Pon Farr, and along the way introduces the notion that Saavik was a Vulcan-Romulan hybrid who was abandoned by her parents and adopted by Spock—lore that is treated as authoritative by many fans. In addition to developing Saavik’s character, they introduced several interesting original characters, including Bearclaw (a hot-headed young officer with a Native American background, a chip on his shoulder, and a violent streak), Konom (a cowardly Klingon who seeks refuge with the Federation and becomes the first Klingon regular character, long before Worf), and Nancy Bryce (who falls in love with and eventually marries Konom).

More than that, they introduced a new mode of storytelling to Star Trek. Whether inspired by Wrath of Khan’s theme of long-term consequences or simply following the increasingly continuity-obsessed norms of 1980s comic book storytelling, the writers created several multi-issue arcs and built in various forms of character development and simmering conflicts (mostly involving Bearclaw, who is a total asshole). While the tie-in novels had seen some “mini-continuities” emerge in the novels of repeat authors (most notably Diane Duane, who contributes a memorable three-issue run in #24-26 of this series), this comic book run was the first time the Star Trek universe was conceived as an ongoing story with explicit continuity rather than a series of one-off episodes.

There was only one problem: the movies themselves. Again and again, the writers had to bend over backwards to accomodate their story to the unexpected events of the movies—of which they do not seem to have had much advance notice, judging from the editorial notes published in the letters columns. The first curve ball came with The Search for Spock, which premiered after the comic had been running for only eight issues. For the viewer of the movies, the idea that any significant amount of time had passed between them, much less a return to normal duty under Kirk’s command, is unexpected. The comics do little to account for that apparent discrepancy, instead focusing on the consequences of the crew’s actions in that film. Our heroes quickly depart from Vulcan to a starbase, where Carol Marcus confronts Kirk about the death of their son David, for instance, and Captain Styles—the commander of the Excelsior, the highly advanced ship that Scotty sabotaged to accomodate their theft of the Enterprise—is tasked with arresting our heroes and bringing them to justice.

Then, in a bold rough cut, we see Kirk back in command of the Enterprise, ordering an attack on the starbase and destroying it. The reader’s initial disorientation gives way to the certain knowledge that we are watching events unfold in the Mirror Universe! We later learn that Mirror Spock has abandoned his plans of rebellion, believing that it would be futile for one man to oppose an empire, and that Kirk has discovered the secret of transporting an entire ship into the Prime Universe. What’s more, he hopes to steal the advanced Excelsior and use its technology to help him conquer both universes. Pretty dastardly stuff, as you might imagine!

Overall, this Mirror Universe story extends over seven consecutive issues, which have recently been collected in a nice edition by IDW. Along the way, Mirror Spock learns of the plight of his Prime counterpart and takes the Klingon Bird of Prey (which the Excelsior had impounded in the cargo bay) back to Vulcan. There, the two mind-meld—which cures Prime Spock and convinces Mirror Spock to be good again. In the end, Kirk winds up seizing control of the Excelsior and defeating the Mirror invasion, but stick-up-his-ass Captain Styles still insists on bringing him to justice. Thankfully, however, a sexy Andorian journalist learns of Kirk’s exploits and publishes them, leading to a mass protest movement demanding his reinstatement. This results in Kirk being put back in command of the Excelsior (which becomes the main ship, since the Enterprise was destroyed in The Search for Spock) with his old crew. But strangely enough, Spock is not part of the package deal—instead, he is given command of a small science vessel, the Surak, which is exactly the kind of thing you’d want to entrust to a guy who had just risen from the dead and mind-melded with his evil double.

This brings us up to issue #16, and the series continues undisturbed for approximately a year and a half. Perhaps chastened by their experience of accomodating Search for Spock, the writers move the main plot forward only incrementally. We also get a number of more one-off stories centering on individual crew members, including some set at different points in the timeline.

Then the franchise drops another bomb in their laps: The Voyage Home. It might be worth pausing to consider the improbability of this follow-up film. As we saw, the comic book staff figured that, with Spock resurrected, some kind of return to normalcy could be expected. They therefore proceeded to give our heroes any number of new adventures. I believe that this approach made sense. Surely no one could have predicted that The Voyage Home would begin seemingly mere seconds after the conclusion of The Search for Spock, with Spock still largely out of commission—to say nothing of the need to travel back in time to placate space-whales.

In order to rejoin the film franchise timeline, the writers embarked on a truly heroic feat of inorganic storytelling. The Enterprise gets a desperate distress call from the Surak, which was been inflicted with a deadly plague that drives its victims mad before killing them. When they arrive, they find that Spock is the sole survivor—but that some of his crew have escaped in a shuttle craft and are at risk of spreading the disease further. The Enterprise quarantines Spock, whose half-human half-Vulcan physiology is confirmed by Dr. M’Benga to have been the only thing that saved him, and then chases after the shuttle, though not before launching the Surak into the nearest star to make sure it’s fully sterilized.

Unfortunately, their course takes them through the Romulan Neutral Zone, which as we all know is off-limits. When Starfleet gets word, good old Captain Styles sees and opportunity to humiliate Kirk and get his command back. He chases down the Excelsior with strict orders to cease and desist, plague be damned. Meanwhile, Kirk has tangled with the Romulans and sees only one way out of the trap—the entire bridge crew needs to board the Klingon Bird of Prey (still in storage, apparently!) to take advantage of its cloaking abilities. Ultimately, Kirk and the Romulan commander come to a grudging mutual respect and find a way to cure the plague, namely running everyone through the transporter. At that very moment, Styles shows up to arrest Kirk, but he insists on taking the Bird of Prey back to Vulcan to help Spock, whom the plague has rendered catatonic… much like he appears to be at the beginning of The Voyage Home.

So we have arrived at the initial conditions of the movie: the bridge crew is on Vulcan, in trouble, and flying a Klingon Bird of Prey, and Spock is not his normal self. In order to get here, they have cured Spock and then re-debilitated him. They have given him his own command and then not just taken it away, but killed the entire crew and flung the ship itself into the sun. They have gotten Kirk pardoned, given him a new command, and then contrived to have him piss off the same guy one more time. Meanwhile, they would have us believe that our heroes just had a Klingon ship knocking around in the attic the whole time. And for what? Has the continuity problem actually been solved? Would any viewer of The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home accept that the nearly twenty issues worth of events depicted in the comic had intervened between the two films? I would humbly suggest the answer is no.

The problem, it seems to me, is that both the comic book writers and the movie producers wanted to create a less episodic version of Star Trek at the same time—and to set it at the same time! The comics would have been fine if they had been set during the five-year mission, and the films would have interfered much less if they had themselves been more episodic and left more room to imagine other adventures happening in the meantime. From our contemporary perspective, the result is a morbidly fascinating car crash—but sadly one that wound up more or less ruining a comic book run that started off with a lot of energy and creativity.

Obviously none of us would trade the magic of Time-Travelling Space Whales for a better run of DC comics back in the 1980s. But I would definitely be willing to trade some money for a nice collected edition of this run, complete with the movie adaptations, so that I could savor its bizarre contradictions more fully.