Do they contradict the TV show's better episodes? Did any series characters got killed in them? Do they revisit any of the storylines/places/races that showed up in the series?
Well, there are a couple of different sources of Voyager comics. There's the Marvel/Paramount Comics series from 1996-98, which ran for 15 monthly issues and a 4-part miniseries that was effectively issues 16-19 in all but name; and there were four different VGR stories from Wildstorm in 2000-01, three graphic novels and a 3-issue miniseries. So that's only 25 comics telling 13 distinct stories. Quality-wise, they're a mixed bag, but there were some I thought were reasonably good, like Marvel #10, the Splashdown miniseries, and Wildstorm's Avalon Rising. Hard to say. There are some minor continuity hiccups here and there, but nothing blatant. Marvel #9 tells a story very similar to the later episode "The Void." #10 involves a time warp to the Battle of Wolf 359 from "The Best of Both Worlds" and shows Klingon ships participating in the battle, which is consistent with a line from BoBW but never reflected anywhere else in canon, so it's unclear whether that fits. Splashdown shows the Aeroshuttle in use, but we never saw the Aeroshuttle in the show, and I think if it had been functional, there would've been no need to build the Delta Flyer later on. And Wildstorm's False Colors is apparently set after "Collective" and is Seven-centric, but there's no mention of the Borg children. There is a bit of a timing discrepancy in Splashdown, the sort of error that can creep in when a storyline spans months of real time while taking less than a day of story time. In the first issue, the story is said to take place pretty soon after "Scorpion," since that story was presumed to fall between issues 13 & 14 of the monthly; but in the last issue, there's a reference to the destruction of the Hirogen relay network in "Hunters," which is much later in the fourth season. But either timing reference could be ignored if you wanted. Naturally that wouldn't have been allowed of any tie-in while the series was underway. Marvel's series features Talaxians and Trabe in #1-3, Kazon in #4-5, and Kazon, Trabe, and Vidiians in #6-8. Wildstorm's False Colors and Elite Force both involve the Borg. Wildstorm's Planet Killer is a sequel to TOS: "The Doomsday Machine."
I just read Voyager: Planet Killer, and I loved it! The three issues together feel like an epic episode of Star Trek, the characters are true to themselves, and the art has suitable scale for the problem facing the crew.
I was just looking through that the other day, and the way the art is set up seemed kind of weird to me, with things overlapping and people's heads floating in the middle of other scenes. I don't mind some of that stuff, but all of it was like that to the point where there didn't seem to be any real panels, and just skimming through it without reading it, it seemed like it could be kind of hard to follow.
I didn't find it difficult to follow. Page layouts are not as beholden to panels as they once were. Deviations can be done well or poorly, and I thought it was done well in this case.
I find the Marvel arc with the Kazon, Trabe, and Viidians can functionally serve as a finale to the ongoing run of season one and two’s plotlines, giving them a relatively solid final wrap up that didn’t really exist in the show proper. Sure, Basics ended the threads of the Nistrim, Cullah and Seska and such - it’s doubtful that, having lost Voyager, Cullah or the Nistrim maintained their dominance, but the Trabe had an opening for development, and the last actual appearance (chronologically) of the Viidians was them as generic antagonists in Resolutions, rather than addressing their storyline significantly.
Which is really lackluster, considering the Viidians were a significant part of the first two seasons. Even if it was something of a restriction placed on Voyager by its inherent story of always being on the move, it still was underwhelming. At least the Marvel arc offered a more direct and hopeful conclusion. I mean, I personally would have preferred to replace a couple of season three episode with a two parter that gave a proper resolution with Voyager being involved with curing the Phage. But in the absence of that, I’ll take the comic as a proper conclusion that features the Voyager characters.
I remember after my last post that a lot of the comics I've been reading don't always have panels, but it's just that the way it was done in Planet Killer just seemed kind of strange.