Inspiration for Annual #3 (Series I) was the playwright Harold Pinter:
PAD said:
"I knew what I wanted to do for Star Trek Annual #3. I wanted to do a romance story, featuring a look at the long-lost, secret love of Mr. Scott’s life.
"And I wanted to tell the story backward.
“'Backward?' asked editor Bob Greenberger.
“'Backward,' I said. I had just seen a play on Broadway by Harold Pinter: a story in which we see the history of a romantic triangle, except the sequence of events is told in reverse order. The play had, in fact, bored me stiff. During Pinter’s trademark lengthy pauses, I kept wanting to scream, 'Somebody say something!'
"But the format of the play intrigued me, and I wanted to adapt it to the long form of the Star Trek Annual. Although I did insist on putting 'Based on a concept by Harold Pinter,' in the credit box. For all I knew, Pinter himself had seen someone else do the same thing and got it from that person, but my first exposure had been from Pinter’s work, and that’s whom I credited. Although it did prompt some befuddled fans to ask, 'Harold Pinter is doing work for DC now?...'
"... That Star Trek Annual remains one of my favorite single-issue comics. With a lesser artists or even simply a different one, the story would simply not have worked. I wrote that issue full script, panel-by-panel breakdown, full dialogue for every panel described ahead of time, because that was the way Curt wanted to do it. He was more comfortable with the full-script format, because that was the way all comics were done when he first started in the business. He was a gracious and wonderful individual, highly flattering and praising of the script. His likenesses of the Star Trek actors were meticulous, and he was able to render convincingly the characters at all ages. We showed Scotty as young as 12 years old, and the face was convincingly that of the future Montgomery Scott. And I would later find out that Scotty’s lifelong love, Glynn, shared her name with James Doohan’s genuine childhood sweetheart, with whom he hooked up (albeit not romantically) in later years.
"I wound up buying a couple of pages from that annual at an art auction at the Chicago Comicon a year or two later. I faced virtually no competition for it: Seeking out full-page drawings from the latest hot artists, the audience had zero interest in a two-page, meticulously rendered sequence wherein Mr. Scott informs his wife that he’s going to be returning to service on the Enterprise. I later caught up with Curt at a convention and he signed them to me."
http://www.peterdavid.net/2012/01/09/thank-yous/
