IDW Publishing recently wrapped up a monumental era of the Star Trek publishing line with the Lore War crossover, which capped off Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing’s multi-year run on the flagship Star Trek series. But that’s hardly the end of IDW’s Star Trek line. The company is in the midst of launching no fewer than four new Star Trek books, each set in a different era of the franchise timeline and focusing on a different cast of characters.
Among these new titles is Kelly and Lanzing’s Star Trek: The Last Starship, a book that resurrects Captain James T. Kirk in the bleak 31st Century era known as The Burn. There’s also Star Trek: Red Shirts, a TOS-era book about those unluckiest of Starfleet members. The lineup is rounded out by two series spinning directly out of the events of the Star Trek shows, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Seeds of Salvation and Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming.
To get a better idea of what’s coming for this ambitious Star Trek relaunch, IGN spoke with group editor Heather Antos and the writers of all four titles - Kelly, Lanzing, Red Shirts’ Christopher Cantwell, The Seeds of Salvation’s Robbie Thompson, and Homecoming’s Susan and Tilly Bridges. Read on to learn more about these new stories and why there’s going to be a Trek comic for fans of all types this summer.
Making Star Trek’s 60 Years of Continuity Accessible
The Star Trek franchise is about to celebrate its 60th birthday soon. At this point, the Trek timeline is one of the most sprawling in all of popular culture, comprising numerous shows, over a dozen films, and countless comics, novels, and video games. It’s enough to wonder how a newcomer is supposed to dive into the massive universe nowadays. But the writers make it clear that each book is designed with accessibility firmly in mind, whether it’s telling a standalone story with a new cast (like The Last Starship and Red Shirts) or building directly on one of the Trek shows (like The Seeds of Salvation and Homecoming).
“One of the neat things [about The Last Starship] is we are separating ourselves by time so much from the Star Trek that people know,” Kelly tells IGN. “We're able to approach these things from a fresh perspective and assume that you don't have all these years of context, because frankly, our characters don't necessarily have all these years of context. So we are very specifically trying to lens in on bringing in, if you are a fan of science fiction in general, if you love Battlestar Galactica, come play with us, right, because that's the broader scope that we're really hoping to welcome to Star Trek so then they can all fall in love with combadges and meeps.”
“We're able to approach these things from a fresh perspective and assume that you don't have all these years of context, because frankly, our characters don't necessarily have all these years of context."“
“I would say that the level of entry for something like Star Trek: Red Shirts, it's niche but also low, because I think you can understand the concept very quickly, which is all of these characters are expendable and you're going to watch a lot of people get hurt and be killed over the next five issues,” Cantwell says. “But at the same time, it's something that we want to make sure it conforms and fits in for the most ardent fans.”
Even with Voyager: Homecoming, a book whose entire selling-point is that it explores what happens immediately after the finale of the TV series, the goal is accessibility. Tilly Bridges explains that the first issue is designed to catch new readers up to speed with the cast and their yearslong odyssey.
“[It’s] giving Voyager fans maybe what they'd been hoping for from the finale, because I really like that finale, but you never actually get to see them get home, and that hurts,” Tilly Bridges says. “So we want to give them that and we want to give the crew one last adventure together, but you also want it to be accessible to people that have never seen Voyager. Maybe say, ‘This is why these characters are so amazing. Go check out that show.’ So I think, hopefully, we hit the balance of recapping everything that you need to go through with it. And then if you're brand new to Star Trek or Voyager, you're just going to get a really exciting sci-fi adventure story and hopefully it'll get you into Trek because Trek's amazing.”
Antos sums up the mission statement of the revamped Star Trek line this way - it’s all about going boldly forward and telling stories Trek fans have never seen before.
“It's really about branching out and taking the Star Trek mission statement of exploring strange new worlds and doing things in the comics that we've never seen done before,” Antos says. “That has been the mission with every single one of these books. I don't want to make the same Star Trek comics that we've gotten the previous 60 years. I want to be going bold. I want to be doing new things, and each and every single one of these captains of their own stories here have taken that mission full steam ahead.”
Lanzing adds, “Star Trek comics have been so many things over the years, but they've never been a little bit of DS9, a little bit of TNG, a little bit of TOS, some of The Motion Picture. My favorite stuff from Voyager, my favorite stuff from Discovery. Lower Decks is there too. We've never had this before. This is a brand new frontier, no pun intended, really, of Star Trek comics because for the first time it's treated like a shared, living comic book universe rather than an adaptation of an IP. And so as we talk about bringing in comic book fans, I think Heather's biggest innovation, and one that we very much enjoyed the freedom of, is treating this like it's all one IP, like it's all one universe, like it's all one story, not a bunch of scattershot individual series that were presented over a long period of time.”
Star Trek: Red Shirts
Of the four books, Red Shirts might have the simplest and most engaging elevator pitch. As the title suggests, it’s all about the hapless Starfleet security officers who are always the first to fall on away missions. The book brings together a wide cast of newly created characters who share one thing in common - each and every one of them has the potential to die before the series ends. As the recently released first issue shows, Red Shirts is wasting no time in racking up a body count.
“Whether or not you know anything about James T. Kirk or Captain Picard or that Janeway prefers her coffee hot and black, you've heard of Red Shirts,” Antos says. “Red Shirts are the memeification of Star Trek in the broader spectrum and you know that to be a Red Shirt means you die in a probably terrible fashion, and I thought that was such a great entry level that we could do a really cool action or kind of greedy, darker Star Trek story that we've not quite seen Star Trek approach quite yet.”
Having a cast of new characters certainly helps in terms of accessibility, but it also creates its own storytelling challenges. How do you introduce the large ensemble cast quickly and efficiently and ensure readers will connect with them, even as they start dropping like flies?
“That was where I think working with Heather and then also Cassandra [Jones], one of our other editors on the books, we came up with the idea of introducing that crew manifest. And the crew manifest, it's not overly written, but it helps you with a snapshot of each person and it's borrowing a little bit from even back in, I think, the ‘90s when X-Men rosters started to get huge and the teams are breaking into blue and gold and this and that, and you're like, ‘Wait a minute, who's what?’ And then Hickman took that further where it's like, ‘Okay, hold on. Stop the story and we're going to tell you.’ And it helps a little bit, right? Because it's monthly, it's not daily, it's not weekly like a television show so that crew manifest really helps.”
Cantwell continues, “And then just giving them kind of little crystallized moments in that first issue so that you can hit little notes. And I know that Chip Miller has a peanut allergy, but I don't think we discussed that in the story ever, but you know he has a peanut allergy, so it's there. The peanut allergy becomes subtext, is what I'm saying, and that is the wonder of the storytelling that we get to do.”
Cantwell expects that readers will grow more and more attached to these new characters as the book unfolds, making it all the more difficult when the final issues arrive and only a handful of security officers are left standing.
“You start with the concept and you go, ‘That's hilarious,’" Cantwell says. “And I think that there's some deaths in it, especially in the first issue, and some that are unexpected or shocking, and still they're very much in the vein of someone being turned into a mineral cube and crushed, which is how our red shirts died in the original series. It's like we're doing that, but I think that they hit harder and harder and harder as the issues go on, especially when you get to the last people standing and you've been with them and you're rooting for them to make it that.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Seeds of Salvation
Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation is exactly what it sounds like - a spinoff of the Paramount+ series. Set between the third and fourth seasons of the show, The Seeds of Salvation focuses on a handful of characters like First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Security Officer La'An Noonien-Singh, Science Officer Spock, and Nurse Christine Chapel as they’re called to a remote, icy world and encounter the horrors lurking within.
What makes this series especially interesting is that Thompson is also a writer for Strange New Worlds Season 4. We were curious how different the experience is writing these characters for TV as opposed to comics. As he reveals, it’s mostly a question of scale.
“The only difference really is sometimes the scale, but that works both ways because there's certain things that, at least in my opinion, you can only really do in a comic,” Thompson says. “A comic operates just in a different way. It's those moments between those moments. Like in Chris's book, it's very much reminiscent to me of what Ostrander did in the Suicide Squad. It was great seeing characters getting killed off, but it was those scenes in the break room that really make you give a s*** about these characters? And I think that's one of the really fun things about working with this group of people is everybody wants to handcraft these tales.”
In this case, the advantage of the comic book medium is that it allows Thompson and artist Travis Mercer to craft a Trek tale that would be very difficult and costly to produce in live-action.
“This was something that I certainly would love to do in the live action version, but it is prohibitively expensive and there are certain realities in production that just boil down to just the laws of space and time that I can't bend,” Thompson says. And so to be able to have Pelia's character show up for a panel is something that I simply can't do on the live action version of it. To be able to have the full cast available at all times, to be able to work on the scale of something that's, as Heather pointed out, Lovecraftian is pretty challenging to do. I mean, I think we do feature quality work on the show, but we're limited by space and time and all those things. And that's one of the things I think that's really unique about comics is that it really can break down that space and time in ways that are both practical and for the story as well.”
Antos adds, “You pitched me, I think, three or four different ideas off the top. And yeah, this was the pitch where I'm like, ‘This is it. There's no sending any other pitch.’ Personally, selfishly, because I'm all for deep sea horror and I've been begging for anyone to pitch me a deep sea horror book for years pre-Star Trek. But also, to me, the ocean is just as equally vast and scary as space is, and it's right here on our planet and this crew is off on a brand new planet but just think of the horrors that are underneath us or in the ocean and make them Lovecraftian space monster size and it makes for pretty tense circumstances for our crew.”
Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming
Star Trek: Voyager’s final episode has always been a bit controversial among fans. While the series ends on a happy note, ultimately bringing Captain Janeway and her crew back to the Alpha Quadrant, we never get to see what happens next. The series wraps with that final shot of Voyager orbiting Earth.
But at long last, fans are getting the added closure they’ve been craving. Voyager: Homecoming picks up exactly where the show left off, seizing the opportunity to explore the many happy reunions while also introducing one final challenge for Janeway and the gang to overcome. As readers will see when the first issue arrives, the series builds directly on some loose ends from the show.
“There were so many different threads you could pull on and be like, ‘Well, you know, Voyager did get home, but also left all of these dangling plug threads out there.’” says Susan Bridges. “So that was definitely something we wanted to hit on in the pitch and be like, who from their past might be fun to play with?”
