IDW Andy Schmidt talks about the company's Star Trek plans for 2009 in an interview with Comics Bulletin. Besides Countdown, there's John Byrne's Crew (about Number One), Ty Templeton's Mission's End (about the end of the Five Year Mission), and the Star Trek II adaptation.
It's about time. I sent that request as the last paragraph of many an entry to the lettercols of DC, Marvel-Paramount and WildStorm over the decades. Yay!
My memory could be playing complete tricks on me, but I seem to remember Bob Greenberger saying that DC wanted to adapt Star Trek II at one point, and the approach they were going to take was that it was going to be done from Saavik's perspective.
Sounds good, certainly more appealing to me than a straight adaptation, don’t really see the point in that...
During my earliest lettercol "pitches", I had suggested that the story of ST II - if they needed a fresh approach - could be told through the eyes of Liz Sherwood, Nancy Bryce, William Bearclaw, Peter Preston and Saavik. Of course, I abandoned that tack when the supporting younger cast was dumped (by ST Office decree). I interviewed Bob in January 1992 and, in response to my question about the missing ST II adaptation opportunity, he said then that he sometimes wondered if it would be viable to do an omnibus reprint of TMP-VI, even though TMP had been done by Marvel and ST II would be being done the first time. I'm sure I'm not the only one to suggest that obvious recruit-perspective angle, and I do recall Bob mentioning the Saavik perspective at one point - was it here? - which gave me a little buzz at the time. Also, around the time of my interview, Saavik was being reintroduced to the TOS movie comics (towards the end of DC's second run). DC had first assumed they could use the very popular Kirstie Alley rendition of Saavik but, as decreed by then-Paramount Licensing, contractual obligations to Robin Curtis meant that her image had to be used.
Hmm, sounds like there will be alot of really cool stuff next year. Wow, I'm shocked noone has done a The Wrath of Kahn adaptation before. The stuff they're doing with it sounds like it could be pretty interesting. Crew and Mission's end sound pretty cool too.
So...how many versions of that event will we have now? If only there were already some other medium which had been doing that in the past few years...
Let's see, there's DC's second annual by Mike Barr; there's The Lost Years; there's the short story "Empty" in SNW 10; and there's the description (though not depiction) of the event in Ex Machina, which takes into account what VGR established about the last mission involving Kirk saving the Pelosians from extinction. (I suppose Mission's End will probably be another version of the Pelosian story.) Those are all the ones I know of.
Yes, wouldn't that have been cool? It could have been something sort of minimalist — such as just words on paper. Maybe bound inside covers of slightly stiffer paper, with pictures on the outside. I know there's a word for that … oh, fiddlesticks, what was that intriguing format called again? Oh, well, if Andy Schmidt didn't mention it, and it's not a movie or a comic book, it's probably not important.
Ah, yes, the Pelosians--the 'Speakers' to the El-Aurian's 'Listeners'. Still pissed that they blocked Min Zife's impeachment. Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
I have really really enjoyed IDW's comics thus far. I gave up on collecting Trek comics after Malibu and DC lost the license and until the IDW line I found nothing of interest in Trek comics. The plans for 2009 sound like a lot of fun and should be pretty interesting! Kevin
Schmidt seems to imply that TWoK is the only Trek movie that wasn't adapted to comics. I think he's overlooking (or deliberately trying to forget) both Insurrection and Nemesmess, neither of which were granted a comic-book adaptation.
"Because it's the only Original Series Star Trek movie that HASN'T been adapted into a comic book." (emphasis added)
Sonni Cooper's "Blackfire" novel was end-of-mission, too, but IIRC, the timeliners shunted it along a little. When "Prime Directive" came out, it seemed end-of-5YM, too, but the timeliners suggested it as a bridge between TOS and TAS, which works very well.
No, it wasn't. True, it does have the ship undergoing a partial refit and a change of uniforms, suggesting a transitional phase toward TMP, but it certainly doesn't end with Kirk getting promoted to admiral or Spock going to Vulcan for the Kolinahr. At the end, the crew is still together and the ship is still on its mission.