859. Choices!PUBLICATION: Star Trek #37, DC Comics, April 1987
CREATORS: Len Wein (writer), Curt Swan and Pablo Marcos (artists)
STARDATE: 8925.2 (immediately after ST IV)
PLOT: Getting the Enterprise-A ready for departure, the bridge crew records personal logs while a religious zealot angry at Kirk for the Genesis Planet sabotages the engines. When the ship does take off, it turns into a time bomb, but Spock defuses it. Back on Earth, the zealot announces the destruction of the demonship Enterprise, but his claims are exaggerated. Oh and Morelli breaks up with Sulu.
CONTINUITY: Post-ST IV, this is the first comic book appearance of the Enterprise-A. McCoy thinks wistfully of Centaurus (where his daughter Joanna lives according to Crisis on Centaurus). Saavik is gone, but Bearclaw, Bryce and Konom return. Arex and M'ress, from the animated series, also join the crew. The last page features the famous "Space, the final frontier..." speech.
DIVERGENCES: The Enterprise-A isn't housed in the same kind of spacedock as she is at the end of ST IV. Spock is said to be rid of his pesky human traits, but later films don't bear this out.
PANEL OF THE DAY - Uhura thinking hard!
REVIEW: Yawwwwwwwnnnnn! Half a comic of people talking to themselves and not being very interesting about it (especially if you already know the characters, which you probably do). This is followed by an extended sequence of Spock sweating over a console, and the villain (one of the few intriguing things about the issue - Genesis as polarizing issue for religious Terrans) gets his comeuppance offstage by... being laughed at? Wow, that's lame. Morelli's departure means the whole subplot was much ado about nothing, and we have to suffer through a sappy romantic scene between Konom and Bryce. Don't know if the returning aliens from the animated series will be more interesting than they were there, but they can't possibly be any less! Guest artist Curt Swan, legend though he may be, makes his ugly likenesses look like eggheads. And to top it all off, Kirk finishes with a speech about never going back and always forward, before the next issue blurb announced #38 will look back at the 5-year mission! "New Voyages" indeed!
Comments
I grew up on Curt Swan comics in the sixties, when it seemed like he drew everything. All the men he drew looked like your Uncle Bob, and his idea of a futuristic high-tech gizmo was a box with a label that said High Tech Gizmo.
Free to draw anything his mind could imagine, everything looked like it took place on the stage of a very low budget theater.
Curt Swan on Star Trek. The mind boggles.