My review of #StarTrek Issue #53 over at Flickering Myth - http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2016/01/comic-book-review-star-trek-53.html
Sounds interesting, but I'm a bit puzzled. It was implied in the film that Gaila was one of the cadets assigned to the ships that Nero destroyed at Vulcan. That wasn't explicit, but it seemed to follow.
The story about Gaila is interesting, it's great they expand characters we saw little of and it also is a good pretext to see more about her race. From what I read, it's fitting with what we know about Orions in canon too. Gaila's moment with her brother, as well as her little reunions with Uhura and Kirk are priceless ^ The starfleet academy spin off is also good and worth to read both for the characters we know and the new ones they added. Anyway, it seems after this comic arc with Gaila, they continue the ongoing series with a new miniseries about Spock prime and his journey on new Vulcan. Does that mean that we won't get a countdown to star trek beyond series, or will they release it separately like they did with the one for stid?
If they plan to release a Countdown to Beyond miniseries before the new movie hits, IDW better get on the ball. The Previews catalog for March has already been published (no Countdown) and April's Previews comes out in a few weeks.
Maybe with Orci no longer involved with the film, the new production team hasn't been as interested in working with the comics on a "Countdown" event. Besides, I gather the story's supposed to be something of a clean break, picking up two years into the 5-year mission without much reference to the past. So maybe it works better for this particular story not to have a specific lead-in. The comics have been depicting the 5-year mission; maybe that's enough.
Idk if this means no countdown to beyond comics but idw just announced yet another comic series for april http://www.startrek.com/article/the-klingons-return-in-idws-manifest-destiny-out-in-april
The series is only April May as it's fort nightly. So there's a tiny June/early July gap? Legacy of Spock is set just after the 2009 movie by the looks of it and has flashbacks to the prime universe. Hopefully it's more than Spock Reflections mk2 the premise sounds similar
If you've seen the bonus scene on the Blu-Ray, featuring Kirk assuming that a blue-uniformed, red-haired, Orion crew member is actually Gaila - and he tries to apologize for using her - then it was possible for us to assume that Gaila was assigned to Enterprise. Hence the canonical delight on her face in the movie, and then Uhura storms off to seek reassignment for herself. So I always assumd Gaila survived. (Also, at least one cadet was heard being assigned to Regula 1, so some of them avoided destruction of the fleet.)
The final part was ok - too rushed and convenient as usual - I would have been very happy for two more issues to give the story and characters more layers but that's nothing new. Nice to think we might see Gaila again and in adding some more layers to Kai, they've elevating him into a full support character, which is nice. If Cupcake is alive and well in the next movie, we might also see him pop back up in the comics after a long absence, which will give us three reasonably rounded recurring security guards plus Yeoman Rand (who sadly has not been seen in female form since issue 13). If they just introduce a couple more 'classic' alien crewmen, maybe some more engineers, since we have three scientists in Gaila (astro sciences), Proto-Data (computers) and Carol (physics and weapons tech), and maybe bring back Chapel as a scientist in life sciences to complement McCoy I think the cast will feel pretty rounded out. I'd even be pleased to see Ensign Decker and Ensign Ilia! Just dammit - more longer stories please! I had a day off work and wasted my time tweaking the ST09 comic to edit out some of the silly coincidences and plot holes about Delta Vega:
Looks interesting. I didn't like the rushed way that the ongoing comic dumped them on some magical 'new' Vulcan. It would have made more sense for them to just build larger settlements on their existing colony worlds. Logically you would assume that they had already colonised habitable moons and planets in their own territory and it's not as if there are that many of them left - ;-P It doesn't make a whole lot of sens that the few survivors would be looking to leave territory in the heart of the Federation to some random uncolonised habitable world which is likely to be at the risky fringes of Federation space. Four parter though and an homage to Leonard Nimoy - big thumbs up.
Maybe I'm reading the dialogue wrong, but a character in the latest issue seems to say that there are 27 million Vulcan survivors. I always assumed the number of surviving Vulcans to be a much lower number, but 27 million is still a fairly large population.
The 2009 movie said that only 10,000 survived the destruction of Vulcan, so maybe the comics are acknowledging off-world colonies after all? Though the way the line was phrased implied that was the total number of Vulcans left entirely:
A lot of people inferred that, but I don't think the lines necessarily implied that. Two lines earlier, Spock referenced "Nero, who has destroyed my home planet and most of its six billion inhabitants." Thus, in context, I think that "no more than ten thousand have survived" means no more than 10,000 of those 6 billion who were on the planet itself at the time of Nero's attack. The "endangered species" line that follows implies that they're all that's left, granted, but that can be read as hyperbole. Or maybe Spock meant that he expected Nero to target the Vulcan colony worlds for destruction as well as the homeworld.
They've been in space for half a million years. Not only do they have colonies, but they probably got lost colonies. Of course before 2000 years ago, Vulcans were without logic, so the species were Romulans by almost any metric.
Here's the dialogue, taken from issue 55: "Twenty-seven million. Give or take a few unaccounted for colonies. Remarkable. A once mighty empire reduced to barely enough to populate a single tiny planet. It's only a matter of time before the Vulcans disappear completely, like stardust scattered on the solar winds."
It's certainly a more realistic population for an interstellar race, although that population is more than enough to sustain the species if enough of them are of child-bearing age. I was disappointed not to see a Celia Lovsky lookalike in the comic but the story itself was nice, just bubbling along, building to something. As far as I can tell, the first issue is essentially in flashback. I don't know where it will go from here.