Star Trek 736: The Legacy of Lazarus

736. The Legacy of Lazarus

PUBLICATION: Star Trek #9, Gold Key Comics, February 1971

CREATORS: Len Wein (writer), Alberto Giolitti (artist)

STARDATE: 10:26.3 - Follows the last issue.

PLOT: The Enterprise discovers a planet inhabited by all the great figures of history from George Washington married to Helen of Troy to Adolf Hitler yucking it up with Winston Churchill. This is made possible by the historian mad genius Lazarus who has found a way to retrieve the brain waves of these people from the void of space and transfer them into android bodies. Unfortunately, he's heard their stories so many times, he's gotten bored. His new plan is the retrieve the great Vulcans of history, but for that he needs Spock's brain (doesn't everybody?). Spock escapes from his bonds, and in the melee, Lazarus' equipment is destroyed, leading all historical figures to start fighting the landing party, and eventually the planet to blow up.

CONTINUITY: Uhura appears in her red uniform. Scotty's still badly colored, but he now speaks with his Scottish accent. McCoy is referred to as Bones. Overall, the terminology is much closer to the show's.

DIVERGENCES: Kirk meets Lincoln before he meets Lincoln, which you'd think would have attenuated his reaction in The Savage Curtain. Still, there's a funny line about Kirk not being able to shoot Lincoln.

PANEL OF THE DAY - After Obama, there will be...
REVIEW: Finally a writer dares claim credit for these comics, and it looks like dependable workhorse Len Wein has actually SEEN Star Trek. The characters actually sound like themselves and have appropriate relationships to each other, which makes a bigger difference than I would have thought. (Can we expect the comic to stop calling solar systems "galaxies" as well?) Wein's story is only slightly less ridiculous than the norm, despite the fact that proper attempts at explaining the science are given, but he definitely uses fewer panels and tries to make the action scenes more dynamic. The weakness here is actually the art, which has a number of mistakes in them (surprisingly for Giolitti). Panel placement doesn't flow normally, and speech bubbles don't always point to the person speaking... unless Kirk can't differentiate Uhura's voice from Sulu's.