Star Trek Comics Weekly #113 – Rich Handley

Rich Handley Author and Editor

Star Trek Comics Weekly #113

An ongoing discussion of how the comics provide prequels, sequels, and tie-ins to the Star Trek episodes and films, soon to be a book from BearManor Media. Click here to view an archive of this article series.

113: IDW and DC Comics, 2015–2017

As discussed in past columns, Star Trek and superheroes are long-time acquaintances. That may seem an odd fit, but the franchise has crossed over with the Spandex crowd multiple times (a topic I’ll explore at length in an upcoming issue of Titan Book’s Star Trek Explorer magazine). Marvel teamed up two Enterprise crews with the X-Men, while IDW brought James Kirk’s officers together with the Legion of Super-Heroes. This week continues that trend with a pair of miniseries combining Star Trek with DC Comics’ Green Lantern Corps.

Star Trek/Green Lantern: The Spectrum War and Star Trek/Green Lantern: Stranger Worlds were scripted by Mike Johnson and illustrated by Angel Hernández. The premise: supervillain Nekron (Black Lantern) kills most of DC’s Lanterns, so Ganthet, the last surviving Guardian of Oa, opens a portal to a universe without superheroes: the Kelvin timeline of J.J. Abrams’ film trilogy. This enables the few remaining heroes—Green Lanterns Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kilowog, as well as Carol “Star Sapphire” Ferris and Blue Lantern Saint Walker—to survive.

A quick primer for those unfamiliar with Green Lantern: The DC mythos features power rings that grant extraordinary skills to wearers, including flight, life-sustaining force fields, and the power to manifest solid-light constructs of anything one might imagine. Rings of various colors behave differently, each responding to a separate emotion. Ganthet brings six such rings (red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet) into the Kelvin timeline, then dies—and if you guessed they’d end up turning members of the Enterprise crew into superheroes, then you guessed correctly.

One area in which these two team-ups stand out is in the unprecedented use of variant covers. IDW has sold multiple covers with its Star Trek line since the beginning, but with The Spectrum War the company outdid itself, as the first issue was released with a whopping 28 cover designs, including sketch variants. Going by the $3.99 cover price, that would have set collectors back $112 for the full set—but it could have been double or triple that amount, or more, given the difficulty in finding the rarer variants. And that’s just for issue #1. Completist collecting is not for the faint of heart or wallet.

Mark Martinez, the proprietor of the Star Trek Comics Checklist website, explains, “The variant cover ranking for Star Trek comics is a little murky because of second printings, reprints, Klingon-language editions and, if you want to be really pedantic, sketch covers. Would we even be discussing this if we weren’t pedantic Star Trek comics fans?” Proving Mark’s point, a good case could be made that the record is held by Star Trek: Infestation #1, which technically sported a jaw-dropping 403 covers: three standard covers, plus 400 unique sketches hand-drawn by Gordon Purcell. But setting Purcell’s sketches aside—since it would be nigh impossible for a single individual to obtain all 400, as there’s only one of each—The Spectrum War takes the prize.

The Enterprise crew finds Ganthet’s skeleton, along with the six rings, and when Montgomery Scott subjects them to Star Trek’s ubiquitous tachyons, three of them choose Pavel Chekov (blue, representing hope), Nyota Uhura (violet, for love), and Leonard McCoy (indigo, compassion), while a fourth seeks out Klingon General Chang (yellow, fear), and the red (rage) and orange (avarice) rings vanish. Prior crossovers had seen Starfleet personnel meeting costumed heroes, but Star Trek/Green Lantern ups the ante by making them the costumed heroes.

The prime Chang appeared in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, so it’s surprising to see his Kelvin counterpart already holding the rank of general, considering the comic takes place 31 years before that film’s events. Transformed into a metaKlingon, Chang assassinates the High Council and claims the throne, only to have supervillain Thaal Sinestro (Yellow Lantern) make Chang his proxy in ruling the Empire. Ultimately, a battle involving the Enterprise, the Lanterns, and Nekron deprives Chang of his ring, and he suffocates in space decades before his prime doppelgänger’s death. To be or, in Chang’s case, not to be.

The red ring chooses a bloodthirsty Gorn (“Arena”), while orange powers an ambitious Romulan. Surprisingly, the Kelvin timeline’s Decius (The Original Series’ “Balance of Terror” and Strange New Worlds’ “A Quality of Mercy”) has become the Romulan Praetor—surprising because he’d seemingly died in “The Khitomer Conflict.” In any case, Decius faces the same fate as Chang after receiving his ring: he slays the Senate and seizes control, then DC villain Larfleeze makes Decius his proxy and the Praetor suffocates when he, too, loses his ring.

The same thing happens to Gorn prince Glocon, who schemes to murder his father, the Gorn Hegemony’s ruler. In this universe, the Gorn homeworld is Gornar, located in the Tau Lacertae System, and it’s populated by the revamped Gorn in the 2013 Star Trek video game. As with Chang and Decius, Glocon makes a violent play for power, only to end up string-pulled by a supervillain—in this case, DC’s Atrocitus—and then die in airless space after his ring abandons him.

The moral: Never trust a supervillain. Or a power ring.

As Decius ascends to über-villainy, writer Mike Johnson ties in two established Romulan characters, both of whom protest his plan for galactic conquest. The first of these is Senator Vrax. If he’s the same Vrax from Star Trek: Enterprise’s “United” and “The Aenar,” that would make him quite old at the time of the comic, which takes place more than a century after his onscreen appearance. Conversely, this Vrax could be a descendant of the 22th-century senator. Either is possible, given Vulcanoid lifespans.

The other is Senator Cretak, a name readers might recognize from Deep Space Nine’s “Image in the Sand,” “Shadows and Symbols,” and “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” which introduced politician Kimara Cretak. If they’re the same Cretak, the situation would be the reverse of Vrax’s, since her 24th-century appearances occur more than a hundred years after the comic’s events, meaning she was older than she’d appeared on TV. Again, though, this Cretak could merely be the other’s ancestor.

The third issue includes a cameo by a character from the 1960s show, though it’s easy to overlook since the name is misspelled. The USS Constellation is commanded by Commodore Dekker, the Kelvin reality’s analogue of Commodore Matthew Decker (“The Doomsday Machine”). As in the prime reality, the starship and its crew are again destroyed, this time by Glocon and Atrocitus as a declaration of war against the Federation.

A battle erupts, with the Enterprise crew and the surviving Lanterns on one side, and the supervillains and their warmongering proxies on the other. It’s a dizzying spectacle, with Starfleet personnel and DC characters flying around a frenzied space war. The Big Bad then emerges, as Nekron resurrects the planet Vulcan and creates an undead army from those slain by Nero, including Spock’s mother Amanda Grayson. Every actor who has played Amanda (Jane Wyatt on The Original Series, Majel Barrett on The Animated Series, Winona Ryder in the 2009 film, and Mia Kirshner on Discovery) has portrayed her as kind and nurturing, so to see her as a zombified thing of evil, cruelly taunting and demoralizing her son, is genuinely unnerving.

The Spectrum War concludes on an unexpected note, for unlike other crossovers that end with the Enterprise and guest casts going their separate ways, this one sees the Lanterns still residing in the Federation. Hal Jordan remains aboard the starship as Kirk’s new pal, Star Sapphire becomes Scotty’s lover, and Starfleet equips its security guards with ring-based phasers and force-fields. That technology upgrade recalls The Animated Series’ life-support belts, and it implies the Green Lantern crossovers should be viewed as occurring in an offshoot of the Kelvin timeline, since power ring technology is not evident in later tales. The bright side: that would explain Decius dying twice.

The following year, IDW and DC collaborated once again to craft the sequel, Stranger Worlds, which revolves around a search for the planet Oa’s counterpart in the Star Trek universe. The Lanterns’ rings are losing their charge, leaving the heroes powerless and ordinary. Only the Guardians can alleviate the problem with their super-advanced battery.

The Green Lanterns have acclimated to Federation life in the months since The Spectrum War, and though they don’t serve in Starfleet, they work alongside the organization and provide Academy guest lectures. As the story opens, for instance, the superheroes help Kirk’s crew evacuate Deep Space Station K-5 when that facility is barraged by meteors. The station is drawn to resemble Deep Space Station K-7 (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), and a two-page spread of the evacuation efforts is quite spectacular.

Just as the previous miniseries saw Chang and Decius receive power rings, the follow-up turns an established adversary into a supervillain as well—this time, the reimagined Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek Into Darkness. According to Stranger Worlds, Khan was cryogenically imprisoned at a secret base following his trial in the Khan miniseries, along with his fellow Augments. Atrocitus awakens Khan, who kills the Red Lantern and is chosen as the red ring’s next bearer.

Khan and his followers slaughter the crew of the USS Bryant, mirroring their atrocities aboard the USS Reliant in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and they conquer the Klingon Empire. (It’s been a rough few months for the Klingons, who have had three alien emperors within a short span of time: Sinestro, then Larfleeze acting in Sinestro’s name, and now Khan.) The Lanterns locate this reality’s Oa, and the Guardians give Kirk his very own power ring, making him a Green Lantern—which readers no doubt saw coming but is nonetheless fun to behold.

In the end, Khan’s ring loses its charge, Sinestro escapes to an antimatter universe, and Kirk returns Khan and his people to prison. It’s unlikely this antimatter universe is the same one from which the irrational Lazarus hailed in “The Alternative Factor,” though it’s amusing to picture Lazarus living in a reality filled with costumed do-gooders and mustache-twirlers. Kirk helps Hal Jordan build a new Green Lantern Corps, then Jordan brings him to a red-sunned world—apparently, the planet Krypton.

That has intriguing consequences, not only because the miniseries concludes without resolution (Sinestro is a fugitive, the Lanterns haven’t returned home, and Kirk is super-powered), but also because it means Superman’s homeworld exists in Star Trek. That’s especially amusing, considering that when DC had the Trek license in the 1980s, editor Bob Greenberger’s attempts to see the Enterprise meet Superman faltered when a Paramount executive proclaimed “Superman’s not real.” Star Trek, of course, is real, and next week we’ll examine more of IDW’s Kelvin timeline saga.

Looking for more information about Star Trek comics? Check out these resources:

Rich Handley has written, co-written, co-edited, or contributed to dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Planet of the Apes, Watchmen, Back to the Future, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Stargate, Dark Shadows, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Red Dwarf, Blade Runner, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman, the Joker, classic monsters, and more. He has also been a magazine writer and editor for nearly three decades. Rich edited Eaglemoss’s Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection, and he currently writes articles for Titan’s Star Trek Explorer magazine, as well as books for an as-yet-unannounced role-playing game. Learn more about Rich and his work at richhandley.com.

One thought on “Star Trek Comics Weekly #113

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

© Copyright 2024 Rich Handley