2025 Comics Thread

[Christopher]

Yeah, the authors of Star Trek: Year Five at IDW had uh...interestingly bad ideas on interpreting TOS characters.

Well, I say bad because my opinion is that it's character assassination of Gary Seven. You may have your own opinion.

I dunno, it would depend on how it was done. His mission was to guide humanity through its most turbulent era and make sure it survived. I could see there being a story where he had to do something ruthless in the short term to protect the greater long-term good, akin to "Edith Keeler must die," say. Although I don't know how it was done in Year Five. I lost interest in that after they portrayed Tholians and humans coexisting in an M-class environment without difficulty.

 

[JD]

I can't believe I missed that in the Year 5 issues I read, that's a pretty big mistake to make since not being able to survive in an M-Class enviroment has been a big part of the Tholians since they were instroduced. I'm kind of starting wonder how Jackson Lanzing and Colin Kelley have become the main Trek writers for IDW, they seem to have a lot of ideas that weird or just bad ideas that are inconsistent or barely consistent with canon.
I know a lot of people didn't care for the Tiptons, but at least they had a pretty decent handle on the canon.

 

[Christopher]

I can't believe I missed that in the Year 5 issues I read, that's a pretty big mistake to make since not being able to survive in an M-Class enviroment has been a big part of the Tholians since they were instroduced.

Well, yes and no. "The Tholian Web" showed Loskene against a strange wavery backdrop that some interpreted as depicting heat haze, so works like the Star Trek Concordance and various tie-ins presumed they were from a hot environment, but it wasn't canonized until ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly."

 

[JD]

Oh, I could have sworn there was a reference to them needing heat or breathing some chemical that was deadly to humans in The Tholian Web, but I guess I was remembering wrong.

 

[tgiokdi]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #1

Cover A by: JP Jordan, Travis Mercer
MSRP: $4.99 USD
UPC: $82771403454700111
Diamond Code: JUN250903

Cover B by: Christian Ward
MSRP: $4.99 USD
UPC: $82771403454700121
Diamond Code: JUN250904

Cover C by: Photograph
MSRP: $4.99 USD
UPC: $82771403454700131
Diamond Code: JUN250905

Cover D by: Travis Mercer
MSRP: $No MSRP
UPC: $82771403454700141
Diamond Code: JUN250906

New York ComicCon Exclusive

Written by Robbie Thompson.

Here comes a Lovecraftian horror the likes of which the crew of the Enterprise has never seen before! Christine Chapel is itching for a real adventure. So, when an opportunity to reunite with her old scientist friend Jinare for research on the planet Poilant crops up, Chapel is excited to finally do what Starfleet does best: explore strange new worlds. However, when the Enterprise arrives in Poilant’s space, the crew cannot make contact with Jinare or any of her researchers. Chapel, Una, Spock, La’An, and Scotty beam down, and they are greeted by… nothing… no one… and no signs of what caused their disappearance, only a robot named D6 who urges them to descend into the planet’s depths in search of his friends. But there’s more than scientists lurking in the watery abyss. Ancient life-forms and behemoths await-and they might mean more adventure than even Chapel can handle.

Images are hosted on www.startrekbookclub.com a site I operate myself and hotlinking is permitted.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Here comes a Lovecraftian horror the likes of which the crew of the Enterprise has never seen before!

Star Trek really could do more with Lovecraftian horror. To quote Carl Sagan, "The universe was not made for us." It's why I was really interested in the Aliens crossover; if anything could upset the hotel-like complacency of Picard and his crew, it's the Xenomorphs.

The late David McIntee would have been brilliant at a Lovecraftian Star Trek novel.

 

[Christopher]

Star Trek really could do more with Lovecraftian horror. To quote Carl Sagan, "The universe was not made for us." It's why I was really interested in the Aliens crossover; if anything could upset the hotel-like complacency of Picard and his crew, it's the Xenomorphs.

The Borg as originally conceived were cosmic horror, a vast power that endangered us because it didn't notice individual people as it trampled us underfoot. But then that was deemed too impersonal, so it started to change as soon as BOBW, and then First Contact and Voyager changed the Borg into space zombies, a more personal-scale threat.

I'm not sure the Xenomorphs qualify as Lovecraftian, since they aren't this vast, unknowably advanced power, they're just predatory animals. Although I gather that the more recent film revival brought in some hackneyed ancient-astronaut cliches, the Engineers or something, and tried to make them into a cosmic-horror threat.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'm not sure the Xenomorphs qualify as Lovecraftian, since they aren't this vast, unknowably advanced power, they're just predatory animals.

I brought them up, not as an example of something Lovecraftian, per se, but as an example of how "the universe is not made for us." How the universe should be full of things that are deadly and cannot be reasoned with. 80s Trek and beyond forgot that. 60s Trek was much weirder, and the universe felt more alien and more dangerous.

Although I gather that the more recent film revival brought in some hackneyed ancient-astronaut cliches, the Engineers or something, and tried to make them into a cosmic-horror threat.

I'm not really sure what Ridley Scott's idea behind the Engineers was, and at this point it probably doesn't matter. I think of Alien: Covenant as "a Star Trek story gone wrong." There's a distress signal, there's a Strange New World, there's the ruins of an ancient civilization... and then everything goes off the rails. I like it a lot.

 

[Christopher]

How the universe should be full of things that are deadly and cannot be reasoned with. 80s Trek and beyond forgot that.

Except in "Q Who," which was explicitly about exactly that.

I'm not really sure what Ridley Scott's idea behind the Engineers was, and at this point it probably doesn't matter. I think of Alien: Covenant as "a Star Trek story gone wrong." There's a distress signal, there's a Strange New World, there's the ruins of an ancient civilization... and then everything goes off the rails. I like it a lot.

I haven't kept track of the later movies, but I thought it was a film called Prometheus that introduced the idea.

 

[David cgc]

I haven't kept track of the later movies, but I thought it was a film called Prometheus that introduced the idea.

Yes, Prometheus shifted to a more darkly philosophical, meaning-of-life-stuff ethos (well, more meaning-of-death), but audiences didn't react super-positively, so Prometheus II turned into Covenant, where an Alien film impregnated Prometheus's storyline and exploded from its chest. Metaphorically.

 

[JD]

Star Trek really could do more with Lovecraftian horror. To quote Carl Sagan, "The universe was not made for us." It's why I was really interested in the Aliens crossover; if anything could upset the hotel-like complacency of Picard and his crew, it's the Xenomorphs.

The late David McIntee would have been brilliant at a Lovecraftian Star Trek novel.

I'm still pissed they canceled the Alien/TNG crossover, that had a ton of potential.

 

[Christopher]

Personally, I'm not fond of horror in Trek, but given that TOS's makers bought three scripts from Robert Bloch, they obviously disagreed.