I've been away from the Star Trek fan community for a while, but I've still been keeping up with my exploration of Trek novels (and watching the DVD's repeatedly), but I reecently "resurfaced" and discovered that IDW has been quite busy with their Trek comics. That's very exciting to me, especially since there are a few TOS ones in there ("Mission's End" particularly interests me). So, I was just wondering which ones people liked and disliked, etc. (Have there been any threads about the comics lately?)
Some of IDW's stronger stories have been Klingons: Blood Will Tell, Countdown, and Year Four:The Enterprise Experiment.
Pretty much any of the TOS ones I like. I was dissapointed in the artwork (not the stories) of several of the TNG ones. My favorites are Klingons: Blood Will Tell and the Mirror Universe one with Pike (I'm not a big MU buff, but I like how Messina draws the Orion women. )
I've read Countdown, and by God is it awful. I'm specifically referring to the plot (or the entire lack thereof) and the characters (Nero is still a stupid villain that makes only the faintest sense). I could describe to you the entire comic in 1 paragraph, and you wouldn't miss a thing. Most of that paragraph would be the action set-pieces that are "just there" without much reason for them having happened. The art doesn't redeem much either, they made the Enterprise-E look like something out of Dr. Seuss on most panels. ...but at least they un-killed Data.
Agreed, though I also like the Alien Spotlight runs. I don't know what it is about TNG that brings out the worst in IDW. The only one I've liked is The Last Generation, which was pencilled by Gordon Purcell. Maybe that had something to do with it.
Yeah, I haven't been blown away by their TNG stuff. I passed on the first issue of Ghosts. Their TOS stuff has been some of the best TOS comics I've seen, for example: Enterprise Experiment, Mission's End, Crew, and Klingons: Blood Will Tell, and Mirror Images have all ben outstanding
Any of John Byrne's Star Trek comics are worth getting. Especially Crew, which was sensational. I enjoyed Nero a great deal. Yeah, it's fanwank, but a good sort of fanwank.
Crew was pretty good, and a bit reminiscent of Marvel's late lamented Early Voyages comic, available in an excellent omnibus edition from IDW. Countdown was the lamest load of fanwank I've read in ages. Haven't read any of Nero or Spock: Reflections yet. Most of the other stuff is somewhere in the middle. I'm rarely blown away by anything IDW publishes, but they're usually not awful, either.
I'm actually quite amazed at how much Byrne has been able to do with the Romulans by way of Caligula. There's a trade of all that coming out soon, and I plan to enjoy it as much as I did the one-at-a-time issues.
Was Nero based on any deleted or cut (before filming) scenes from the movie? Because I saw that the plot was about Nero being captured by Klingons, and I seem to remember a news item and maybe even a spy photo from the set of Nero, captured by Klingons, which, of course, was not in the movie. Did I just dream this?
^Yes, the Nero comic is partly an adaptation of (and expansion on, I assume) the deleted scenes from the film in which Nero and the Narada crew are held captive in Rura Penthe.
Correct. One nice touch is one of the guards at Rura Penthe is a very young W. Morgan Sheppard, who was the jailer in Star Trek VI.
John Byrne's Star Trek: Crew and any of his Romulan stuff is great. Crew is already in trade paperback, and all the Romulan books will be collected along with a new adaptation of "Balance of Terror" from the Romulan perspective sometime soon. He really captures the look and feel of TOS. Byrne's Star Trek: Assignment: Earth didn't work quite as well for me as his other Trek books, but that's hardly an indictment -- it's still a really fun book, and one issue even acts as a sort of prequel to an issue of Crew.
I havent' here recentaly, but there are some that I do like. The ones I like is The Countdown,Spock Refelections,Mission End,The Wrath of Khan,Nero, and some others. I like to get Year Four and some of the Alien Spotlight's. I know after the first of the year they plan on releasing a Captain's series. I think the first issuie is Sulu. I'm hopping they do one of Kirk then Spock, because they are my favorites. I think they are also releasing a movie adaptaion of Star Trek XI as well. I plan on getting those if they do.
My opinions are basically the same as others here: Countdown was cheesy in its gratuitous inclusion of TNG characters. Nero is cool as a Star Trek: The Deleted Scenes adaptation (right down to the four-eyed alien at Rura Penthe ). Spock: Reflections is a nice, contemplative story. The civilisation in Mission's End was interesting, but I didn't like anything else about that story. I have the issues of Romulans: Schism and Crew, but I've been saving them up for a John Byrne marathon. I'm also waiting on a delivery of the DVD-ROM of the pre-IDW comics, at which point I anticipate a second, nostalgic marathon...
I liked Transformers: All Hail Megatron- great art, neat stories... a bit slow in places, sometimes with too many pesky humans, but it was interesting, unforeseeable in places, etc. I hadn't read comics in years, so as an intro to them, it was a positive experience.
I really enjoyed the last bridge scene with Kirk, Spock and McCoy deciding to go their separate ways, but the whole series was tough on the eyes since the type style used to show the aliens' dialogue was hard to read. That kind of made it less enjoyable to me.
John Byrne has a new series coming out in 2010 called McCoy: Frontier Doctor, set during the period between the five-year mission and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And yes, that's a Pierson's Puppeteer on the cover to issue #2!