Star Trek 1089: The First Casualty

1089. The First Casualty

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation #71, DC Comics, May 1995

CREATORS: Michael Jan Friedman (writer), Gordon Purcell and Terry Pallot (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (after All Good Things...)

PLOT: Tholians are attacking Federation colonies, apparently in retribution for attacks on their own territory. The Enterprise crew, still reeling from the future Picard told them about in the series finale, are called in to investigate. But first they pick up a Tholian expert, Riker's father Kyle. Will wasn't expecting him to come aboard with his new bride-to-be however...

CONTINUITY: This is the first appearance of the Tholians (The Tholian Web) in the TNG era. Beverly experiences a holodeck scenario in which Picard asks her to marry him after the events of All Good Things. Similarly, Geordi tries to write a book. Picard writes a letter to his brother Robert (Family). We see Picard's family album for the first time (Generations). Kyle Riker was first and last seen in The Icarus Factor.

DIVERGENCES: The Tholians' full-length body are first imagined here, but do not look like the Tholian later seen in the more canonical In a Mirror, Darkly.

PANEL OF THE DAY - You waited almost 30 years for this.
REVIEW: This is scarcely the same comic I was reading with issue #70. With Gordon Purcell, we finally have an artist who DRAWS. No photocopies, no stilted scenes built from tracings. It's a huge change. Everybody seems to be bringing their A-game at that, with the letterer including captain's logs in the familiar Star Trek console font/graphic, and Friedman giving as much space to personal moments as he does to the plot. In fact, even the victimized colonists and Tholian attackers have room to breathe. You care when a Klingon child dies, and you care that the Tholians don't feel goud about what they're doing. The gap between the All Good Things future and the present is well explored, making it rather clear that nobody's really going to go the way Q set out for them. But above all, this is a BIG story. Tholians are cool no matter what, and through the use of other ships, bases and alien species, as well as the use of continuity, the comic has scope.