Star Trek #1438: The Truth About Tribbles Part 1

1438. The Truth About Tribbles Part 1

PUBLICATION: Star Trek #11, IDW Comics, July 2012

CREATORS: Mike Johnson (writer), Claudia Balboni (artist)

STARDATE: 2259.155 (follows previous issue)

PLOT: Scotty tries a transwarp beaming his pet tribble to Earth, and coincidentally, the Enterprise tracks the Klingons to the planet of the tribbles.

CONTINUITY: The comic starts with a flashback to Delta Vega (Star Trek) and a scene involving older Spock and a tribble bought off [Cyrano] Jones (The Trouble with Tribbles). The Klingons already consider the tribbles the Empire's greatest enemy (Trials and Tribble-ations). The tribbles' predator looks like a glommer (More Tribbles, More Troubles).

DIVERGENCES: Scotty has a nephew called Chris; it is not known if this is meant to be the same character as that of Peter Preston (Wrath of Khan). Obviously, the new timeline has changed a number of events if Jones has come into possession of tribbles this early, and the Klingons marked tribbles for death without Scotty's original intervention.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Revealed! What eats tribbles?
REVIEW: Another completely new story, excellent! Classics really can't be approved upon, so The Trouble with Tribbles is essentially "replaced" in the J.J. Abrams timeline with this completely different first contact with the lovable, fertile furballs. For the first time, we get a look at their native environment, a beautiful, quirky planet as designed by Claudia Balboni whose pleasant,colorful and thin-lined art seems well suited to a light-hearted tale. The tribbles' natural predator provides a bit of action - I hope those phasers are on stun or else you'll break the ecosystem in half! - and there's the promise of some Klingons in the next chapter (hopefully). It IS a bit of a stretch that Scotty would be fiddling around with tribbles (and accidentally infesting Starfleet Academy) just as their planet comes into range, but his role as comic screw-up is fun enough. So, of course, not on the same level as The Trouble with Tribbles and certainly not as funny, but it at least breaks new ground and goes its own way. I respect it for that.