Comics fans: A few questions from someone who isn't (yet?)

[Thrawn]

I just read New Frontier: Double Time, my first foray into Trek comics, and I wasn't very impressed; it seemed short, undeveloped, and with a few nice pieces of artwork but mostly bad interpretations of the ship and crew.

So, I'm asking, what is Double Time like compared with some other big name Trek comics? If I didn't like this, should I stop here? What are some other collections that I could maybe check out, if they'd be way better than this? And how does Double Time's length relate to the length of most comic stories?

Seems like a huge thing that I've been missing, and I want to know more about it, but based on this one, it may not be for me. What do you all think?

 

[BillJ]

I just read New Frontier: Double Time, my first foray into Trek comics, and I wasn't very impressed; it seemed short, undeveloped, and with a few nice pieces of artwork but mostly bad interpretations of the ship and crew.

So, I'm asking, what is Double Time like compared with some other big name Trek comics? If I didn't like this, should I stop here? What are some other collections that I could maybe check out, if they'd be way better than this? And how does Double Time's length relate to the length of most comic stories?

Seems like a huge thing that I've been missing, and I want to know more about it, but based on this one, it may not be for me. What do you all think?

Try DC second run (Star Trek) issue #19, "Once A Hero", powerful stuff by Peter David.

There's also DC first run (Star Trek) Annual #2, "Final Mission", which deals with the end of the five year mission.

'Star Trek: Early Voyages" and "Starfleet Academy" from Marvel are very good as well.

Problem with Trek and comics for me was always the art. Tom Sutton and Ricardo Villagran who did the artwork for the majority of DC's first run were just awful. But there were some great stories in there.

There is a ton of great stuff out there if you're willing to dig a little.

 

[Thrawn]

Would those be available in trade collections I could get from Amazon, or just in general how would I go about finding them?

 

[Dayton Ward]

Make the splurge and buy the Comics DVD. It's an inexpensive way to check out the full spectrum of Trek comics. There's a lot of great stuff in the DC runs, and I second the vote for Marvel's Early Voyages.

Some of the more recent stuff IDW's been doing has been fun, too. I just picked up Crew #1 on Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to reading that this weekend (along with a stack of other stuff).

 

[Thrawn]

Where is the Comics DVD sold?

And I'd think I'd prefer to read them on paper; isn't it... annoying, reading comics on a screen?

 

[BillJ]

Make the splurge and buy the Comics DVD. It's an inexpensive way to check out the full spectrum of Trek comics. There's a lot of great stuff in the DC runs, and I second the vote for Marvel's Early Voyages.

Some of the more recent stuff IDW's been doing has been fun, too. I just picked up Crew #1 on Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to reading that this weekend (along with a stack of other stuff).

What he said.

You can get the 'Star Trek Comic Collection' on DVD from Amazon (paid $30 for mine and it has roughly 500 issues starting with the Gold Key stuff from the late sixties).

Definitely not as fun to read on a PC monitor...

 

[ronny]

Dayton is right, check out the DVD for the older stuff.

Of the newer IDW comics I've just been picking up the trades when they come out so I'm behind but the one that's I thought was by far the best was Blood Will Tell, retellings of TOS episodes from the Klingon point of view.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I have potentially an even dumber question.

What is it people find attractive about reading comics? They're too short, they seem underdeveloped compared even to TV or movies, let alone an actual book...not a lot of bang for the buck, if you ask me.

I'm not trying to flame here. I actually want to know, what is it comic book fans read them for? What do they get out of them that no other medium supplies to the same degree?

 

[Captain Randy Hall]

I just read New Frontier: Double Time, my first foray into Trek comics, and I wasn't very impressed; it seemed short, undeveloped, and with a few nice pieces of artwork but mostly bad interpretations of the ship and crew.

So, I'm asking, what is Double Time like compared with some other big name Trek comics? If I didn't like this, should I stop here? What are some other collections that I could maybe check out, if they'd be way better than this? And how does Double Time's length relate to the length of most comic stories?

Seems like a huge thing that I've been missing, and I want to know more about it, but based on this one, it may not be for me. What do you all think?

I've been a comics fan since the late 1950s, and it always saddens me when fans make this huge distinction from TV and movies, which are both visual media, to comics, which again is a strong visual medium. The closest I can tell is that comics are still considered a kids' thing.

The best of the best? One of my all-time favorite Trek stories was a graphic novel called "Debt of Honor" that was written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by Adam Hughes. Tremendous stuff.

Some of the current stuff from IDW is pretty good, though because of the licensing thing, you have to pay an extra dollar.

One of the best was "Klingons: Blood Will Tell." That linked all the appearances of Klingons throughout the episodes and made it all fit wonderfully. Very cool.

There's also been a couple of "Year Four" mini-series. The best of those is the second one, which was written by Dorotha Fontana and drawn by one of the best artists to touch Trek because of his realistic art style, Gordon Purcell. It featured the female Romulan commander, Arex and other little-known characters.

Another great series is the "Star Trek: Alien Spotlight" run. Each issue focuses on one of the races in Trek in a stand-alone issue. Very, very much fun.

As you've probably guessed, IDW is publishing Trek stories in five- or six-issue series that can be made into a trade paperback that you can also find at the local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Check with your local comics store and see what they have. There's another New Frontier series out now, but I don't think you'll like the artwork very much. Such is life.

 

[BillJ]

I just read New Frontier: Double Time, my first foray into Trek comics, and I wasn't very impressed; it seemed short, undeveloped, and with a few nice pieces of artwork but mostly bad interpretations of the ship and crew.

So, I'm asking, what is Double Time like compared with some other big name Trek comics? If I didn't like this, should I stop here? What are some other collections that I could maybe check out, if they'd be way better than this? And how does Double Time's length relate to the length of most comic stories?

Seems like a huge thing that I've been missing, and I want to know more about it, but based on this one, it may not be for me. What do you all think?

I've been a comics fan since the late 1950s, and it always saddens me when fans make this huge distinction from TV and movies, which are both visual media, to comics, which again is a strong visual medium. The closest I can tell is that comics are still considered a kids' thing.

The best of the best? One of my all-time favorite Trek stories was a graphic novel called "Debt of Honor" that was written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by Adam Hughes. Tremendous stuff.

Some of the current stuff from IDW is pretty good, though because of the licensing thing, you have to pay an extra dollar.

One of the best was "Klingons: Blood Will Tell." That linked all the appearances of Klingons throughout the episodes and made it all fit wonderfully. Very cool.

There's also been a couple of "Year Four" mini-series. The best of those is the second one, which was written by Dorotha Fontana and drawn by one of the best artists to touch Trek because of his realistic art style, Gordon Purcell. It featured the female Romulan commander, Arex and other little-known characters.

Another great series is the "Star Trek: Alien Spotlight" run. Each issue focuses on one of the races in Trek in a stand-alone issue. Very, very much fun.

As you've probably guessed, IDW is publishing Trek stories in five- or six-issue series that can be made into a trade paperback that you can also find at the local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Check with your local comics store and see what they have. There's another New Frontier series out now, but I don't think you'll like the artwork very much. Such is life.

Agreed on Debt of Honor.

Gordon Purcell also pencilled a large number of issues during DC's second run.

 

[Captain Randy Hall]

I have potentially an even dumber question.

What is it people find attractive about reading comics? They're too short, they seem underdeveloped compared even to TV or movies, let alone an actual book...not a lot of bang for the buck, if you ask me.

I'm not trying to flame here. I actually want to know, what is it comic book fans read them for? What do they get out of them that no other medium supplies to the same degree?

Part of this has to do with the history of comics, which started as comic strips more than 100 years ago. Kids liked reading the newspaper strips, so someone decided to collect them and sell them to kids who didn't get the paper.

Before long, coimics began carrying new material, including Superman and Batman. During World War II, the comics characters turned their attention to Nazis and stuff like that.

By the time I got into comics in the late 1950s, comics had been tarred with a nasty brush by claims that comics were bad for kids. People complained that Robin was a homosexual partner for Batman partly because his real name was Dick. Yeah, that was pretty stupid, but it forced the industry to make up a Comics Code Authority to keep everyone in line for a while.

Also at the time, super-heroes had become the dominant material in the comics, though some folks ran science-fiction stories in some of the books.

After that time, comics began having fewer pages to hold down escalating printing costs and having more "mature" content. Whereas the comics in the 40s were very cartoonish, their later counterparts kept pushing the envelope toward realism.

During that time, publishers had to strike a balance between what people will pay for a comic and how much they can produce. One big trend these days is the collection of storylines into trade paperbacks. That's nice if they're good stories, but many comics have gone to a cinematic style that stretches four pages of plot into 20 pages of full-page spreads.

Also, it's not that there are fewer pages so much as the industry started spreading stories over several issues when before you'd get 4 or 5 stories in a single issue.

Star Trek got its first exposure in comics by the infamous Dell series. Since then, the property has bounced from one publisher to another, all of which conked out when they had to charge more because of the cost of the license. The current publisher of Trek, IDW Publishing, has a pretty good run of Trek going.

OK, there'll be a quiz on this tomorrow morning.....

 

[Thrawn]

I don't have any preconceived notions about comics that I'm aware of, I've just never read any. I read Watchmen a couple weeks ago and it blew my mind, so I've been starting to try out some other comics as well; as a medium, it has possibilities I hadn't considered.

I just didn't like Double Time specifically, and was wondering how it related to other Trek comics.

If I didn't like Double Time, am I going to like the IDW stuff?

 

[Therin of Andor]

I read Watchmen a couple weeks ago and it blew my mind, so I've been starting to try out some other comics as well; as a medium, it has possibilities I hadn't considered.

Maybe the closest in feel to "Watchmen" is "Debt of Honor"! Chris Claremont is very wordy, but the graphic novel also includes multiple flashbacks, so you are definitely getting a complex storyline.

I just didn't like Double Time specifically, and was wondering how it related to other Trek comics.

Well, I got into Peter David's writing through his TOS movie comics for DC, so a graphic novel of his "New Frontier" books was unmissable, especially for the sneaky cameo of Ensign Janos the Mugato, Morgan Primus hiding her face so we can't see she looks like Majel Barrett, even though we know that she does, and so on.

If I didn't like Double Time, am I going to like the IDW stuff?

Well, maybe you won't like "Turnabout" (the recent NF mini-series), or "Countdown". But I'd definitely give the "Alien Spotlight" or "Blood Will Tell" omnibuses a spin.

Or WildStorm's "The Gorn Crisis" or "Unforgiven" graphic novels.

 

[Thrawn]

Well, part of what I didn't like about Double Time was how it seemed like he tried to cram in absolutely everything he possibly could. Canon bitchfixes, every single character including the Grissom ones, inside jokes, flashbacks... it all just rushed by too fast, felt like he had a list of Stuff That Should Be Here that he was just checking off as quickly as possible.

I felt like it would've been a great story, novel or graphic novel, if it had been like 4x as long.

I did go ahead and throw Alien Spotlight and Blood Will Tell into a huge graphic novel Amazon order I've been working on; I don't much like to have hobbies but rather obsessions, and I'm getting a lovely extra paycheck soon for some extra work I did, so I think I'm going to start a graphic novel collection. I've got $500 worth so far - all of Joss Whedon's stuff, much of Alan Moore's stuff, some choice Star Trek and Star Wars, and a few other I've been recommended by people I trust. I'd rather I thoroughly explore all that the medium has to offer, give myself a real context, than just pick up one or two here or there and not really get them.

So that should be a fun project for a few months...

Are there any others I should really try? It looks like "Once A Hero!" is collected in "Best of Peter David"; is that worth the purchase? (The more I think about it, the more I really don't think I want to be reading these things off a DVD. Maybe if I like the ones I order in TPB, I'll consider it.)

 

[Trent Roman]

And I'd think I'd prefer to read them on paper; isn't it... annoying, reading comics on a screen?

I recall you mentioning that you had a Kindle, do I not? I find reading comics on a computer a lot easier than reading a block of text. I would venture it's because the format encourages the eye to roam instead of the uniformity of reading lines, which I find straining.

What is it people find attractive about reading comics? They're too short, they seem underdeveloped compared even to TV or movies, let alone an actual book...not a lot of bang for the buck, if you ask me. (...) What do they get out of them that no other medium supplies to the same degree?

I've felt the same way. What's this flimsy, side-stapled piece of tissue, with it's twenty-two pages of story and half again amount of ads? Never saw any point in purchasing something I'll be done reading before I even get to the counter. And the artwork was pretty uniformly ugly, a bunch of dots or lines with a limited palette of faded colours; why bother using the visual medium at all? But I think the genre has improved significantly. The advent of the graphic novel and trade paperback compilation makes the stories available all at once, in a chunk, rather than squirts seperated by months, a yields a story that actually feels like a story rather than something so short it seems barely worth mentioning, or else, seeking to tell a story of too great a length for the page constraints, too jammed-up and busy to allow the story to actually breathe. Particularly since the growing popularity of the format have led some creators to plot towards an eye for arcs that can be reprinted in such a fashion, such that pacing finally matches form. And the technological improvements in printing and/or illustration principles are also of note; no longer do they look like a child's color-me-in book or extended attempts to duplicate Monet, but instead feature rich colours, detailed renditions, and an eye towards the potential grandeur of the image. Like a good film, actually making use of the visual dimension of the medium, to me, justifies whatever trade-offs there may be compared to a written text--and the dynamic nature of a lot of comic book stories asks for such a portrayal.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Thrawn]

Kindle is WAAAAY easier to read than a computer screen; no comparison at all. Kindle is easier to read than a book is. If you haven't tried one, you have no idea. It's genuinely surprising.

 

[captcalhoun]

i liked Double-Time. 'canon bitch fixes'? WTF?!

 

[Steve Roby]

Would those be available in trade collections I could get from Amazon, or just in general how would I go about finding them?

if you don't want to go for the DVD, there are a lot of trade paperbacks. The ones already published are listed here, though there'll be several more over the next few months. Of course, if you really want to find out a lot about the Trek comics, see Mark Martinez's website.

I just didn't like Double Time specifically, and was wondering how it related to other Trek comics.

If I didn't like Double Time, am I going to like the IDW stuff?

Well, that's kind of like saying, "I don't like the New Frontier books, will I like any of the other Pocket Star Trek novels?" Peter David's style in comics is every bit as distinctive as his style in books is (and I think the former has adversely affected the latter to a considerable extent).

Some of the IDW comics have been not so good, some have been pretty good, but I don't think any have really been holy-crap-this-is-amazing good yet. But then, personally I think that's true of Trek comics in general. There have been a lot of very good solidly entertaining Star Trek comics, but not many that I've been really excited about. I did quite like the Early Voyages series about Pike that IDW's reprinting in trade paperback in May, though.

The thing is, you can't judge all Trek comics from one issue any more than you can judge all Trek books from a single novel, or, for that matter, judging filmed Trek by watching "Threshold." The DVD may not be the best reading option if you're not crazy about reading a lot off a screen, but it gives you the best chance to sample a lot of stuff for the price of a couple of the trade paperbacks. And then you can go on and track down trade paperbacks that collect the stuff you like, bearing in mind that a fair amount of comics haven't been reprinted yet.

 

[Christopher]

I have potentially an even dumber question.

What is it people find attractive about reading comics? They're too short, they seem underdeveloped compared even to TV or movies, let alone an actual book...not a lot of bang for the buck, if you ask me.

I'm not trying to flame here. I actually want to know, what is it comic book fans read them for? What do they get out of them that no other medium supplies to the same degree?

Generally, comics are comparable to episodic TV in terms of length and development, although it might take 2-3 issues to correspond to an hourlong (or rather 42-minute) episode. Most comics these days have more-or-less serialized storytelling comparable to the depth of the plotting on serial shows like Lost or Heroes, and most superhero comics have far more depth, complexity, and maturity than most of the feature films based on them (though recent films like the first two Spider-Man movies, the Nolan Batman films, and Iron Man have come closer to the comics).

But there's a lot of diversity in comics. Asking "What do people see in comics?" is like saying "What do people see in movies?" or "Why do people like music?" Comics aren't a genre, they're a medium. There's no single thing that all comics have in common besides the use of narrative sequential art.

 

[Thrawn]

Well, that's kind of like saying, "I don't like the New Frontier books, will I like any of the other Pocket Star Trek novels?" Peter David's style in comics is every bit as distinctive as his style in books is (and I think the former has adversely affected the latter to a considerable extent).

Some of the IDW comics have been not so good, some have been pretty good, but I don't think any have really been holy-crap-this-is-amazing good yet. But then, personally I think that's true of Trek comics in general. There have been a lot of very good solidly entertaining Star Trek comics, but not many that I've been really excited about. I did quite like the Early Voyages series about Pike that IDW's reprinting in trade paperback in May, though.

The thing is, you can't judge all Trek comics from one issue any more than you can judge all Trek books from a single novel, or, for that matter, judging filmed Trek by watching "Threshold." The DVD may not be the best reading option if you're not crazy about reading a lot off a screen, but it gives you the best chance to sample a lot of stuff for the price of a couple of the trade paperbacks. And then you can go on and track down trade paperbacks that collect the stuff you like, bearing in mind that a fair amount of comics haven't been reprinted yet.

Oh believe me, I'm quite aware of this. But if someone asked if NF was representative of the rest of the Pocket line, I could say "Well, styles vary all over the place, but in general New Frontier is substantially more over-the-top and wacky compared to the rest of the Pocket line. If more serious fiction is more your style, try Titan." or something like that. I'm looking for that kind of recommendation.

What bothered me about Double Time was the short/undeveloped nature of the storytelling, and the giant-tit-ification of all the girls, more or less. I'm asking if that is common or not.

So, longer stories, artwork that is either more interesting or more realistic. Where should I look?