Star Trek Comics Weekly #2

An ongoing discussion of how Star Trek comics provide prequels, sequels, and tie-ins to the episodes and films…

2: Gold Key, 1967-1970
Welcome back to Star Trek Comics Weekly, which explores the history of Star Trek comic books from the standpoint of how licensed stories have served as prequels, sequels, or tie-ins to television episodes and theatrical films. This week’s column revisits issues #1–8 of the franchise’s very first comic book line, published from 1967 to 1979 by Western Publishing’s Gold Key Comics imprint.

During its 12-year run, Gold Key published 61 sporadic issues, plus four supplemental tales in a quartet of collected editions titled Enterprise Logs. Though entertaining, this freshman Star Trek line, particularly its early issues, were often a continuity nightmare. Although the 1960s TV show confined space travel to within the Milky Way, the Enterprise frequently left our galaxy in the comics. The crew seemed to choose their uniform colors randomly, stardates were incorrectly punctuated, Starfleet equipment was usually misnamed, and the Enterprise was powered by rockets, with a metal-riveted interior more geared toward a World War II-era submarine than a 23^rd-century starship.

The crew’s actions were often askew as well. They typically adopted a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, going so far as to destroy all life on a planet in issue #1 rather than consider any other solutions to their problem du jour. Spock was highly emotional and acted illogically, while Kirk reacted out of fear or surprise, wantonly killed his adversaries, and called Janice Rand “honey.” Characters were sometimes physically unrecognizable, with Scotty drawn as a blonde and Uhura sporting the wrong skin color. What’s more, everyone uttered over-the-top exclamations—”Shades of Pluto!”, “Great zounds!”, “Suffering star dust!”, “Great galloping galaxies!”—and planets tended to have silly names like Kelly Green, Metamorpho, Numero Uno, and Questionmark.

Later issues would better gel with The Original Series‘ tone once the publisher brought in writers and artists familiar with the source material. In the first eight issues, however, writer Dick Wood displayed scant knowledge of the show’s premises. It seems doubtful he’d even seen the show before signing aboard as writer, and his accompanying artists are on record as not having watched it either. It is thus difficult to cite direct sequels, prequels, or tie-ins among these stories—because there aren’t any. Any connections that can be made during Wood’s tenure are strictly indirect ones.

For example, McCoy’s sickbay laboratory features experimental animals in issue #1, just as it does in The Animated Series‘ “The Terratin Incident.” And for issue #5, artist Alberto Giolitti modeled a building after Canada’s Toronto City Hall, which would appear in The Next Generation‘s “Contagion” as a destination available via the Iconian gateway. (The futuristic building, designed by Viljo Revell, has also appeared in many movies, including The Kidnapping of the President, starring William Shatner.)

Issue #8, meanwhile, sees the crew turned into children, a concept similarly utilized in the cartoon’s “The Counter-Clock Incident” and in TNG‘s “Rascals.” All of these connections, however, are purely coincidental. It’s also interesting to note that issue #7 opens with the destruction of France’s Eiffel Tower, which would appear intact in TNG‘s “We’ll Always Have Paris” and Deep Space Nine‘s “Homefront”—something Wood, of course, could not have predicted.

That’s about it for connections between Dick Wood’s run and televised Star Trek. The writer’s eight issues form a strange pocket realm in Star Trek comics lore, in which the starship, the crew, and Starfleet ideals bear little resemblance to their onscreen counterparts beyond surface similarities. In many ways, these early efforts are akin to the weekly British Star Trek strips that would launch two years after Gold Key’s first issue, which exhibited many of the same problems and for largely the same reasons.

Still, despite its absurdities, Gold Key’s comics can be great fun to read—not necessarily as great Trek or as solid science fiction, but simply because they’re so absurd they’re wonderful. Every series has its growing pains and Gold Key’s peculiar corner of Star Trek was no different. Eventually, the comics would fall more in line with the TV show, starting with the arrival of the series’ second regular writer, Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein. Tune in next week to learn about Wein’s tenure—and find out how well he predicted the United States’ 45^th President.

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Looking for more information about Star Trek comics? Check out these resources:

• The Complete Star Trek Comics Index, by yours truly
• The Star Trek Comics Checklist, by Mark Martinez
• The Wixiban Star Trek Collectables Portal, by Colin Merry
• New Life and New Civilizations: Exploring Star Trek Comics, by Joseph F. Berenato
• Star Trek: A Comics History, by Alan J. Porter

Rich Handley has written books about Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and Watchmen, as well as licensed Star Wars and Planet of the Apes fiction, and he edited 70 volumes of Eaglemoss’s Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection. Rich co-edited Titan’s Scribe Award-nominated Planet of the Apes: Tales from the Forbidden Zone; nine Sequart anthologies discussing Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Hellblazer, Stargate, and classic monsters; and four Crazy 8 Press anthologies about Batman and (now) the Joker. He has contributed essays to DC’s Hellblazer: 30^th Anniversary Celebration; IDW’s Star Trek and Star Wars comic-strip reprint books; BOOM! Studios’ Planet of the Apes Archive hardcovers; Sequart anthologies about Star Trek and Blade Runner; ATB Publishing’s Outside In line exploring Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Babylon 5; and a Becky Books anthology covering Dark Shadows.