Oh sure, if your going to bring up specifics use facts and logic, well then, sure.... Seriously, in broad general terms, I don't see where the Kirk commanding the Excelsior and Spock commanding the Surak between ST 3 & 4 is contradicted by the dreaded canon. The only thing ever established about the time in between the movies is that they were in exile on Vulcan for three months before the begining of TVH, which works just as well being three months after the The Doomsday Bug as it does being three months after TSFS. And I agree that the coolness factor of those stories really is the only important thing.
...which admittedly didn't stop my teenaged self from going through all sorts of mental contortions trying to make it all fit. ("Right! Saavik's pon farr-induced attack on the Enterprise blew open exactly the same parts of the hull that Khan's did, and that's why Kirk's suddenly depressed about Spock's death again in STIII. Absolutely!")
I wasn't quite convinced by the lead-in to Star Trek III, so at the time, I wrote my own story that went in-between issue #8 and Star Trek III. It wasn't very long -- maybe fourteen or fifteen hand-written pages. The Klingon War in issues #1-4 was an attempt by the Klingons to take Genesis by force. When it failed, they turned to subterfuge. Kruge was a cousin of Koloth's, and he wanted revenge for Koloth's death. So, with the aid of Klingon spies, he faked intelligence that the Klingons were going to take the Regula-I station, while the real attempt to take Genesis would do so by gaining the secrets of the Genesis Planet. (The idea was that Starfleet would be more willing to defend the space station than they would be to defend an evolving planet.) The Enterprise took heavy damage, but managed to fend off the Klingon attack on Regula-I, and the ship was so damaged (since it was much more damaged in Star Trek III than it was at the end of Star Trek II) that they had to offload characters like Bearclaw, Bryce, and Konom while the ship limped home. It wasn't very good. I wrote it when I was 11. But I thought it was a better continuity implant than what we got, and it made the events of Star Trek III as much a continuation of Mike Barr's early stories as it was a sequel to Star Trek II. Now I'm regretting not polishing this up and sending it in to Strange New Worlds... :/
This is considerably more pimp than I thought. For whatever reason I had in my mind how sucky it would be to have comics on a DVD that you'd watch on a TV (the menu navigation alone would be terrible). Little did i know they were data DVDs. NICE. Now the egregious lack of the X-Men/ST cross overs is a huge pile of SUCK for me, because those are the ones I care most about. (They are in fact the only ST Comics I've ever read) and I did so based on the fact that they tied into the novel Planet X so well. I'm sure the problem has something to do with licensing and being able to distribute the X-Men characters, but still. Nevertheless I may just get this so I can finally see what the hype is all about with the Trek Comics.
Alex Fletcher at TrekMovie.com says the X-Men comics are supposed to be included, even though they aren't listed in the flap (see comments #45 and #75). davidh
Ooh, look at comment #54! So it may still happen. I hope it works out. Although I hope that set doesn't cost as much.
Hey, can anyone tell me which comic featured Janice Rand? I read the synopsis on... Memory Beta, I believe... and it sounded cool!
I can only think of a couple of comics featuring Rand, aside from some of the early Gold Keys (including the first issue, where the colorist misinterpreted her beehive as a wool hat and colored it red). She was prominent in issue 12 of Marvel's 1980-81 series, "Eclipse of Reason" by Alan Brennert and Martin Pasko. And she was featured in the fifth annual of DC's 2nd TOS series, "The Dream Walkers" by Michael Jan Friedman.
That usually means a different company will be distributing to international markets. Try asking your local comic shop to order it in for you.
Sounds like you have lots to catch up on then. Many of them were much better than the X-Men crossovers.
Thanks, Chris! "Dream Walkers" was the one I was thinking of. So... an artist thought her 'do was a HAT? And made it RED? WHAT WAS HE THINKING?
^ "That's the most impractical, high-maintenance hairstyle for life aboard ship I've ever seen. Maybe she should just wear a hat."
To quote Kirk, "I know, but really...." By the way, Vonda's Enterprise: First Adventure indicates that Rand wore her hair like that a kind of rebellion against her past life as a slave. (i.e., she wasn't allowed to let her hair grow, or style it, back on that planet.) Maybe it's also a way of expressing her confidence. ("What the heck. If I can handle a style like this, I can handle a lot.") Well, hey! A lot of times, movie-makers have sci-fi babes wear their hair in the most rediculous ways. Remember Princess Leah's cinnamon buns? But then, I've seen girls wear worse....
The artists who did the early issues had never seen Star Trek. They lived in Italy, I think. All the artists had to go by was photo reference. Also, keep in mind that the line art and coloring in comics are done by different people. The colorist might never have even seen the photo reference that the penciller saw. He most likely just got line art of a woman with a big conical woven thing on the top of her head, and since he'd never seen the show or the reference photos, he must have concluded that it was a wool hat. I mean, really, to the uninitiated, that's a more plausible thing for it to be than some bizarre, ridiculously overcomplicated beehive hairdo. Keep in mind that this was the '60s, while the show was still on the air. Nobody had any idea that ST would become some big media franchise that was intensely analyzed to its smallest detail, or that the comics they published would be preserved on digital media four decades later. To them, they were making disposable magazines based on disposable entertainment properties. It was an assembly-line thing, without the kind of care and devotion that gets put into today's Trek comics.
Come to think of it... do any comic writers ever imagine that "one day, the first editions of my comics'll be worth a cool million"? I wonder if it ever entered the mind of Peter David....
Actually, there's a lot more visible soot and damage in ST III (both on the bridge and to the hull) than we saw at the end of ST II.
You're thinking about "Hardware Wars". The buns were eaten off Princess Anne-Droid's head by Chinchilla the Wookiee Monster.
Funny and terrible at the same time It should be interesting to read some of these old timers when I get the DVD but I am glad I never bothered buying the printed collections.