TOS comics: 5-year mission vs. movie era

I've been re-reading some TOS comics lately, and it struck me how rare 5-year mission stories were through most of the Marvel and DC eras -- and conversely how rare movie-era comics stories have become in the new millennium. I wanted to do a quick survey of that.

Of course, the original Gold Key and UK Trek comics in the '60s and early '70s were all 5YM-era, since there wasn't anything else. The Gold Key series ended in early 1979, so it just missed the TMP era. The Power Records comics were 5YM as well, although the rebranded Peter Pan record comics redrew the uniforms to TMP-style (while still using pretty much 5YM-era art for the characters' faces and the Enterprise).

But Marvel's initial 18-issue run was purely TMP-era, since they didn't have a license to anything else. The LA Times newspaper strip was movie-era throughout, first TMP-style and then changing to TWOK-style in 1982. And when DC started up, their first series was in the serialized vein of most comics, so it stayed firmly in the post-TWOK era, only visiting the 5YM with the occasional fill-in issue and annual.

After the last Gold Key issue dated March '79, we didn't see another 5YM-era story (aside from the odd flashback here and there in movie-era issues) until DC's first annual in October '85, "All Those Years Ago" by Mike W. Barr. This was the first account of Kirk's first mission as Enterprise captain, but it was a flashback story with a frame set in the movie-era continuity of the regular comic. (In the same month, the regular series featured a TMP-era fill-in story by Walter Koenig.)

The next two 5YM stories came nearly a year later, in September '86. Annual #2 gave us "The Final Voyage," another Barr tale telling the end of the 5YM, featuring Will Decker and a return to Talos IV. This was the first comic in seven and a half years to be set entirely during the 5-year mission. Meanwhile, #30 featured a fill-in called "Uhura's Story," written by Paul Kupperberg and illustrated by the legendary Carmine Infantino. This was another story with a movie-era frame to a 5YM flashback, but since Infantino was new to drawing ST, he drew the movie-era cast aboard the 5YM-era Enterprise (approximately) on the first few pages, and on the final page, he mistakenly drew frame-story Kirk and Uhura in flashback-era costumes.

Shortly thereafter in issue #33, the regular series did a 20th-anniversary story where the ship and crew from "Tomorrow is Yesterday" overshot the mark by 20 years and met their movie-era selves. You could sort of call that a 5YM-era comic, except it's part of the ongoing movie-era continuity. The next full-on 5YM story is another fill-in, #38, "The Argon Affair!" by Michael Fleischer and Adam Kubert, a mediocre tale involving Seussian alien pirates and a scantily-clad bad girl that Kirk falls for. But it was another year and a half before we saw another 5YM fill-in, used as the final issue of the series, #56 in November '88, "A Small Matter of Faith" by Martin Pasko and Gray Morrow. It's kind of a weird story about an alien faith healer, and its art is, to me, pretty terrible. For instance, phaser beams are represented by some kind of color overlay that's printed almost invisibly faintly, so some panels seem to show people writhing in pain for no apparent reason.

And that's it for DC Vol. 1 -- two good to excellent annuals and three forgettable fill-ins. (Parts of Annual #3, "Retrospect," were set in the 5YM, but it started post-ST IV and flashed back progressively throughout Scotty's life, so that was a small part of it.) Vol. 2 had even fewer 5YM stories for the majority of its run; the only one in the first 57 issues of the regular series is #16 from February 1991, the fill-in "Worldsinger" by J. Michael Straczynski and Gordon Purcell (JMS's only published Trek story to date). It's kind of an interesting story, but I find the characters a little off; it shares a quality with Pasko's fill-in, in that both stories seem more mystically oriented than is typical for Trek.

The next time we saw the 5YM was in July '91, with the 4-part The Modala Imperative miniseries by Michael Jan Friedman (with Peter David doing the TNG-era 4-parter of the same dual miniseries). We also saw a couple of annuals set pre-TOS; Annual 2 in 1991 was Peter David's version of Kirk's first year at Starfleet Academy, and Annual 4 in '93 was a Pike-era story by Michael Jan Friedman. The Chris Claremont/Adam Hughes hardcover graphic novel Debt of Honor in 1992 had flashbacks set in the pilot era, the series era, and the TMP era, with the main story happening post-TVH. But "Worldsinger" and Modala were the only full-on 5YM stories for the first four and a half years of Volume 2 (discounting that Modala was half of a TOS/TNG crossover).

That changed in 1994, when Margaret Clark took over as editor. Under her, the comic rapidly shifted gears back toward the series era. First came the "No Compromise" 3-parter from issues 58-60 (Feb-Apr '94), another 5YM flashback within a movie-era frame, focusing on Chekov's early days on the ship. This was by the series' regular writer Howard Weinstein. After a movie-era fill-in issue, #62-63 told a 5YM 2-parter by Kevin Ryan, who followed it up with a Gary Mitchell story in #64, with Kirk post-"Where No Man" flashing back to the Dimorus incident mentioned in that episode. Also in '94, Annual 5 was a 5YM story by Friedman, focusing on Janice Rand.

Weinstein then did a couple more 4-parters continuing the movie-era arc of the series, but with #73 in July '95, the series abruptly switched to a pure series-era focus. Weinstein's swan song was the 3-part "Star-Crossed" telling the story of Kirk and Carol Marcus from the Academy to the end of the 5YM. After that, Ryan took over as the regular writer for the last five issues, including another Gary Mitchell-era one-shot and a four-part 5YM story. Also, Special #3 in Winter '95 featured "The Unforgiven" by Friedman, set some time after "Operation -- Annihilate!" as Kirk tried to help his nephews cope with their parents' death. The second story in Special #3, "Echoes of Yesterday," was a movie-era story by Mark Altman, albeit with time travel back to the events of O--A!

Ever since then, most TOS comics have been set in the 5YM, and movie-era stories are scarce enough to count on your fingers -- the reverse of the pre-1994 pattern. The only time Marvel's ST Unlimited series (combining TOS and TNG tales) visited the movie era was a Captain Sulu story in #8 (March '98). Although they also did the Untold Voyages miniseries in March-July '98, set between TMP and TWOK. Wildstorm did one TOS-era one-shot (All of Me) and one set in what we'd now call the Lost Era (Enter the Wolves). Their 2001 anthology special also included an Enterprise-A story called "Bloodlines" by Ian Edgington, and an interesting piece called "The Legacy of Eleanor Dain" by Christopher Hinz, which takes place half in the TMP era and half in the TNG era.

TokyoPop's TOS comics were entirely 5YM, I'm pretty sure (I don't have the first one). As for IDW, they've mostly done 5YM, with only a few exceptions. Klingons: Blood Will Tell had a pre-TUC frame for 5YM-era flashbacks. Alien Spotlight: Gorn was a pre-TWOK Reliant story; AS: Klingons has one scene set in the Lost Era with Kang and Demora Sulu; and AS: Tribbles is set in an ambiguous timeframe. Parts of Spock: Reflections flash back to the movie era or the Lost Era. Captain's Log: Sulu could be movie-era or Lost Era, and CL: Harriman is Lost Era. Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor is pre-TMP, and the last issue or two of Khan: Ruling in Hell presumably take place during the movie era, since the final issue apparently leads into TWOK.

But while IDW's dabbled in various facets of the movie era, they've never actually done a straight-up movie-era Enterprise or Enterprise-A story. We haven't seen one of those in the comics since 2001, unless you count IDW's Wrath of Khan adaptation.

There's a clear pattern here. While the original-series movies were coming out, from 1979 to 1994 (counting Generations), the comics pretty consistently focused on telling stories set in the "present," with only occasional, brief nostalgic glimpses at the TV era. Yet within a year after the original-cast movies ended, we saw TOS comics shift their focus almost entirely back to the 5-year mission. Other characters are explored during the movie era, but virtually anyone who writes comics about the Enterprise crew focuses on the 5YM.

I think that's kind of strange. Look at Pocket's novels during the same periods, and you see a mix of movie-era and series-era tales. Early on, there was a fair number of movie-era books, but they were always in the minority, interspersed among plenty of series-era books. And if anything, there was an upsurge in movie-era novels in the wake of The Undiscovered Country, as various writers were inspired to explore what came after the last couple of movies. They're still outnumbered by 5YM novels, but they've arguably been a bit more common since the TOS movies ended.

So why is it that the comics took such an all-or-nothing approach when the novels have consistently featured a mix of both eras? I can understand why the comics coming out between '79 and '94 stuck primarily with the movie era, because a comic-book series is more of a continuing serial than a novel series, so it makes more sense to keep moving forward than to jump around randomly. But I don't get why the comics of the past two decades have so completely lost interest in the movie-era Enterprise crew, when the novelists have continued to touch on them periodically. If anything, I'd think that fans of Trek comics would have fond memories of DC's movie-era comics and would want to emulate them, at least occasionally.

Oh, this was a much longer post than I thought it'd be. Better wrap it up now.

 

I assume it's because of the perception that the classic TV series era is what fans want to see in a comic.

Or, in simpler language, "sales."

I mean, why didn't Ex Machina, one of my favorite Trek novels of the past decade or so, kick off a REGULAR, annual series of movie-era Trek novels? Instead, we've gotten an occasional movie-era novel, when we're averaging something like 4 series-era novels a year?

My guess, again, is "sales."

I'd love to see IDW take a chance on some movie-era stories, but I hope they'd be better than their three-part "Wrath of Khan" adaptation which, frankly, was pretty terrible. And I think, apart from a one-shot here and there, TWOK is the only movie era comic IDW has done.

 

^But that's just it -- we do get occasional movie-era tales in the novels, and we always have. But the comics went from almost exclusively movie-era pre-'94 to almost exclusively series-era post-'94. Why the difference between the two formats?

 

At a guess: Beauty before Age.

I'm no comic writer or artist, but if I was the former [Devil's Advocate here], I'd be thinking - What's more likely to sell? A comic featuring the young, energetic, dashing heroes you still see today on TV almost any day of the week (or - now - in the movies), or their older, grayer, chubbier/gaunter, slower selves? It's the younger versions the kids who buy comic books today know, the younger versions that are in all the marketing, the younger versions that have ingrained themselves into pop culture. Besides, the best stories of the movie era were already told in the movies (or previous comics/novels); there's no story you could write for the TMP 2nd FYM (or post-TFF 3rd) that couldn't just as easily fit, with a little massaging, into the 1st.

As an artist, what would I rather draw - the clean lines of the TOS-era starships, or the ultra-detailed TMP versions? (AbramsTrek is a whole 'nother ball of cooing fur.) Simple primary-color uniforms, or elaborate pastel-color jumpsuits/burgundy turtlenecks with all those pins? And again, who wants to draw a fast-paced action/adventure sci-fi story based around a cast of senior citizens? There's a reason Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man etc. don't grow any older in their regular series... (Nor, for that matter, did the Star Wars cast in the now-defunct post-ROTJ EU.)

As a sheer practical matter, it's a lot easier to recreate the swinging 60's vibe of TOS on ink & digital paint than to try to filter it through the lens of the 80's.

 

Well, DC seemed to do pretty well with a regular comic -- two consecutive regular comics -- featuring the older, movie-era cast. Granted, they had the movies as a current, ongoing concern to support that, but still, it seemed to work for them.

And that's just the anomaly I'm wondering about. Surely the movies have played a key role in TOS's enduring popularity. A lot of the public's perception of the characters, like the notion of Kirk as a renegade or the belief that TOS was built around a 7-member ensemble rather than just three leads, was shaped by the movie series. And sure, the characters are younger in TOS, but the movies have more up-to-date visual effects and don't feel quite as dated as the original show. I'd think that would give them more appeal to younger audiences, not less.

So I find it odd that the movies haven't had more of a lasting influence in the years since they stopped coming out. I'm sure that people still watch them and talk about them. Heck, look at all the more recent Trek movies that have used The Wrath of Khan as their touchstone. The movies' influence can't have completely evaporated in the past 20 years. So why don't we see more movie-era stuff intermingled with the TV-era stuff?

If I were an artist, or an art director, I think I'd like to see a mix of both, for variety's sake. The movie era adds some good designs to the mix.

Now, that's just ridiculous. Kirk was in his 50s in the movies from TWOK onward, Spock roughly the same age, and Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov in their 40s. That's nowhere near "senior citizens." There have been plenty of action heroes in their '40s and '50s. Of the Avengers cast, for instance, Robert Downey, Jr. is currently 49, Mark Ruffalo is 47, Don Cheadle is 50, and Samuel L. Jackson is 66. Meanwhile, on Agents of SHIELD, Clark Gregg is 52 and Ming-Na Wen is 51 (and totally kicking ass in the action scenes, and looking incredible while doing it). Harrison Ford was 47 in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (although his character would've been 39). Sean Connery remained active as an action star into his 70s.

I don't even understand what that means. It makes no sense to talk about movie-era comics as if they're somehow impossible, since we have well over a hundred DC issues proving otherwise. Movie-era comics were the norm for over a decade, and then they stopped.

 

And Liam Neeson is 62, and he seemed to really come onto the action scene in a big way in the last few years thanks to the Taken movies.
Even though the actors were older, we did still get a fair amount of action, from Kirk especially, in the movies. I've been kind of frustrated we've gotten so few TOS movie era stories the last few years. My first experience with TOS was the movies, so I've always been very attached to the movie era.

 

As I said, Christopher, it was just a guess. I don't really know what the comic writers/artists are thinking. Or more likely the executives at the comic companies that would commission (or approve the commissions of) such titles. I'd much rather see more movie-era stories myself.

 

DC already had a near guarantee that Star Trek fans who read comics will probably pick up the book. But comics fans who happened to see the movie would probably be more interested in the "current" cast showing continuing adventures of the people they just saw. I was already reading comics at the time, but I got really into Trek after seeing The Voyage Home and I was dying to see "what comes next" after the end of the movie.

12-year old me was also much more likely to pick up a book with the maroon jackets on the cover (like Deep Domain) than a TOS book. That quickly changed when I ran out of books like that, but I was initially very excited about the continuing adventures of the Enterprise-A. (Actually, I didn't realize at first that the registry was different. I hadn't noticed it before so for a very short time I thought the original Enterprise was NCC-1701-A too.)

 

OK, how about this:

Comics are short (and getting shorter -- IDW recently went from 22 story pages per issue to 20). Their short nature makes them episodic. Four or five issues of a comic book cover about the same story ground as an episode. So, comics are like episodes.

Novels are much longer; a novel can cover a great deal of time and territory, kind of like a movie.

So it's a format thing. Comics, being episodic, gravitate towards mimicry of episodes. Novels, being bigger, gravitate towards mimicry of movies.

Sadly, my analysis falls apart under scrutiny. We still get far more TOS series-era novels than TOS movie-era novels. Maybe the simplest answer is: book and comic buyers have more nostalgia for a 46-years-gone TV series than they have for a 24-years-gone movie series.

 

I do think there's something in the fact that the visuals of TOS lend themselves better to the comics page.

 

This. Exactly this. We're living in a culture more obssessed and driven by collective nostalgia than ever before, and we've been seeing some forms of subconscious expression of this attitude all over Star Trek itself during the past several years, in the form of an increased cultural reverence for the "purity" and primacy of the TOS television series (and conversely, what seems to be a mild disdain for the movie era) across multiple forms of media.

From the recent J.J. Abrams films reinventing the '60s TV show; to (as Christopher points out) nearly all modern comics taking place during that time period; to only one movie-era novel getting published in almost four years (Greg Cox's this past November, not counting some of the recent shorter e-novellas), and even down to bizarre nostalgic peculiarities such as Paramount Home Video's decision back in 2003 to jettison the traditional production-ordering of episodes on the TOS DVDs (and, ultimately, the Blu-Rays) in favor of the original 1960s NBC broadcast-ordering, as if this "long-lost" sequencing possesses magical, talismanic properties which enhance the overall legitimacy of the show, or something.

This seeming cultural shift in preferences has been very interesting from a sociological standpoint, and one can notice virtually almost zero representation of the movie era in the popular media except maybe when someone's making a reference to or riff on The Wrath of Khan (which is, you'd think, just going by the collective zeitgeist, apparently the only pre-Abrams Trek feature film worth remembering). Otherwise, it's always strictly the bright primary-colored TOS television uniforms and character depictions.

To be sure, there are 79 TOS television episodes (and 22 animated episodes) compared to only six feature films, so there is simply more there for a culture to familiarize itself with on a macro-level, but this still doesn't entirely account for what Christopher rightly mentions in his original thesis -- namely, what caused this whole shift in cultural preference away from the movies, and back towards the TV show?

That sheer "tyranny-of-numbers" attrition between episodes and movies doesn't totally factor in, given that, for fifteen years, we saw lots of movie-era stories produced, until 1994 or thereabouts. Perhaps it was simply era-fatigue? Or, at least in the comics, certainly, which had been producing almost nothing but movie-era tales since 1979, but this still fails to explain the novels, which were pumping out a pretty decent mixture of stories across multiple time periods.

And so we come to today, where, again, the dominant preference for writers seems to almost universally be for the 5YM time period, in virtually all media...and I'm frankly at something of a loss to explain why this is, and why the movie era lays almost creatively fallow when plenty of publishing room still exists at the inn for both eras. Yet most of today's TOS output is hugely dominated by only one time period. Is it because creators feel that there are simply more important/substantive stories to be told with the younger, greener TV-era crew, as opposed to with their older, wiser, maroon-jacket-wearing counterparts? I honestly can't say.

It could simply be that, for an entire generation who grew up with the '60s television show, it was (and is) "their" Star Trek, and most of them have that pet, long-gestating 5YM tale inside them that they're wanting to tell, which could explain the relative glut of TV-era stories we've experienced lately. I personally prefer the older incarnation of the crew, but culturally I seem to be somewhat in the minority, here.

(Holy crap, this post went long...)

 

I'm reminded of something John Ordover said about fifteen years ago about the kinds of original series novels he would buy. He said that, excepting something like New Earth, he saw only two eras worth exploring -- the 1966-1969 era or the post-Star Trek VI era. He didn't see the 1979-1991 movie era as offering anything new or different to the characters; with the exception of when Kirk's at the Admiralty, they're all in their familiar roles, just ten or fifteen years older and with slightly different ranks.

Is that IDW's calculus in deciding what to commission? Honestly, I doubt it. I think they're operating from the perspective of what the average punter thinks when they think of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- the familiar colors of 1966-9. Their sales are going to be about the same no matter which version of the characters they use, so it's simply easier to use the most familiar version unless the story absolutely demands otherwise.

Plus, in the past few years when we've had a Kirk/Spock/McCoy story from IDW, outside of the crossovers IDW has used the Abrams movie universe. Even though I think it would've been more appropriate in the Legion crossover to use the movie-era versions of the characters (since, if memory serves, Roberson used the early 80s Legion), I still understand why IDW used the television versions, because it's what people know.

 

True, but by now there must also be a generation that grew up on the movies. Heck, that would pretty much include me, since I was in sixth grade when TMP came out. And I know there are other Trek novelists who are very close to my age, like KRAD and Dave Mack.

I mean, look at general pop culture today, and we're seeing the revival of kids' shows that were popular in the '80s and '90s, like Transformers and Ninja Turtles and My Little Pony and Jem and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. (The Power Rangers franchise has been in essentially continuous production for the past two decades now and is still being made, but it's MMPR in particular that's getting the movie reboot and the gritty fan-film parody and all the other nostalgia cred.) So pop-culture nostalgia in general is currently focused on exactly the era when the TOS movies were coming out. It's strange, then, that we aren't seeing more nostalgia for those movies.

 

I think it boils down to action and sex.

Since comics are sequential still images, the tendency is to overcompensate with depictions of bombastic movement and hyperbolic action scenes. TOS is more associated with Kirk grappling an opponent or charging head first into a melee than the movie era Kirk. Trek comics, by their very nature, are already saddled with an inability to make starship battles as visually interesting or dynamic as film, so the artists lean more heavily on fisticuffs or phaser shot-outs to imbue a scene with action rather than a static image of the Enterprise firing its torpedoes.

Superhero comics are known for the hyper-idealized bodies of their heroes and heroines. Kirk or Uhura in their prime are much closer to this (unrealistic) ideal body type that comic artists are familiar illustrating than the movie era Kirk or Uhura. The TOS uniforms are more form-fitting and revealing than the movie era garb, so if the goal is to make a comic figure more dynamic-looking or provocative on the page, TOS costumes would make a better choice. Plus, I imagine those post-TWOK uniforms would be a pain to draw, with the flaired pants and shoulder padding.

Another possibility...

Ever since the 90s, comic publishers have made a big push at deconstructing what kinds of comics sell, what sorts of covers stand out on the stands, story specific covers vs. movie poster covers, etc. I suspect that this sort of market-savvy thinking is why the movie era setting has been largely abandoned in the last few decades by Trek comics.

Which would sell better: A Trek comic with Nu-Uhura on the cover or a Trek comic with Final Frontier Uhura on the cover? If IDW believes the answer is Nu-Uhura, then that decision dictates the content of the comic and the tail wags the dog.

Another possibility...

The Wrath of Khan adaptation sold lousy so the movie era is deemed a poor seller, so IDW avoids movie era projects like the plague. It happened to DS9 after their failed mini-series.

 

^That could be it. The more sales-oriented mentality leading to limitations on experimentation and variety. Particularly since comics sales in general are so much lower than they used to be (paradoxically, given how much comic-book properties dominate film and TV today). Still, it's odd how abrupt the transition was almost as soon as the original-cast movies ended.

I suppose another factor is the difference between current properties and nostalgic ones. At the time of the post-'94 comics from DC, Malibu, Marvel, and Wildstorm, the present-day Trek was stuff like TNG, DS9, and VGR, and the publishers focused heavily on those -- just as IDW now focuses most of its attention on the Abramsverse. So those incarnations represented the current version of the franchise, and that left TOS as a nostalgic property, something looking backward. And defining it as nostalgia would tend to direct people's attention more toward the original series than its later revivals.

Still, as I said, you'd think some people would be nostalgic for the movie era at this point. So sales pressure is probably a factor in suppressing that.

 

That's quite interesting, and something I'd never managed to hear before, but it does explain a few things regarding why we saw so very few post-TMP/pre-TWOK, post-TVH/pre-TUC novels published during the Ordover era (apart from, as you mention, New Earth and novels like Dayton's In the Name of Honor). Yet his whole attitude towards the 1979-91 movie period is utterly perplexing -- it's like he wasn't even paying attention to where these characters were at all. Spock experienced what is arguably the single largest epiphany of his life from V'Ger, and was profoundly changed forever as a result. Kirk, having just regained a starship-captaincy after years in the bureaucratic wilderness, would never take such a situation for granted again, and has a very different outlook on life because of this fact.

Each of the other main characters have undergone similar life-changes to varying degrees during the TMP time period, and are at very different places than they were during the 5YM. And this isn't even factoring in the events of TWOK, TSFS, and TVH yet, which represent a whole new additional layer of life-altering character experiences for this group, which not only affect them all on a purely personal level, but which also have greater in-universe historical repercussions all the way up through TNG.

Spock dying and then being resurrected, the Enterprise's destruction, the death of Kirk's son, the launching of a brand-new Enterprise...if Ordover didn't think any of these years had anything to offer in terms of meaningful character-substance, he was smoking something dangerously magical. I mean, truly...he'd rather have continued onward with yet more, reset-button-pushing, planet-of-the-week 5YM stories rather than occasionally examining these characters during their later years after they've actually learned a thing or two the hard way? The only significant movie-era stories worth telling are the ones after they've already retired?

From my viewpoint, those extra ten or fifteen years' experience that Ordover seemed to take so lightly makes all the difference in the world, in terms of ultimately defining who these people were.

 

Not to mention Chekov being security chief. L.A. Graf did a lot with Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov in the movie era -- and now that I double-check, I see that all of their books set in that period evidently came out before Ordover's tenure as editor.

I guess that means I never would've had a chance of selling Ex Machina to Ordover. Not that I'm surprised; his tastes and mine never really overlapped much. I'm glad Marco Palmieri was willing to be more experimental.

 

My thought: an occasional novel in the movie era displaces one month of sales for a TOS novel. A comic story set in the movie era would cannibalize 4-8 months worth of sales. So it's a greater risk relative to a single novel set in the "less popular" era.

 

That explanation would work for the current IDW miniseries-driven format. But before that we had things like Marvel, which did monthly standalone TOS stories in their Unlimited title, and Wildstorm, which did assorted one-shot graphic novels alongside their miniseries.

But then, both their licenses were cut short kind of abruptly. Maybe they would've dabbled more in the movie era if they'd gone on longer.