Star Trek Comics Weekly #3

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

3: Gold Key, 1971-1972
This week, we’ll examine Gold Key’s Star Trek #9–16, by Len Wein, with a continued emphasis on how licensed stories serve as prequels, sequels, or tie-ins to television episodes and theatrical films. The prior tales, by Dick Wood, had little resembled the 1960s TV series, so perhaps it’s just as well that he only wrote eight issues from 1967 to 1970. Once Wein came aboard, the Gold Key run began better aligning with the show—and even offered up a direct sequel or two.

In “The Savage Curtain,” TV viewers learned that James T. Kirk greatly admired U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Gold Key’s ninth issue references this hero worship, with Kirk so impressed by an android infused with Lincoln’s brainwaves that he finds it difficult to attack the replica. Incidentally, another android contains the mind of Alexander the Great, but since “Requiem for Methuselah” had established that Alexander was an immortal named Flint, who was still alive during Kirk’s era, his brainwaves should have been unavailable to harvest.

It’s issue #10 that contains the first bona fide comic-book sequel to a Star Trek TV episode. After a genie immobilizes the Enterprise, Kirk encounters a sorcerer named Chang, once part of a group of humans who’d left Earth in 1997 to protest the Eugenics Wars. This makes the issue a direct sequel to “Space Seed,” which introduced the tyrannical Khan Noonien Singh. (The wars lasted from 1992 to 1996, though, so it’s unclear why anyone would be protesting the conflict after it was over.)

In fact, the original intention had been for Chang to actually be Khan, but writer Len Wein was told he couldn’t do that. As he explained in The Monster Times #2, Gold Key’s Star Trek licensing deal with Paramount at the time only allowed the use of the regular cast members, not guest stars (this would apparently change, given later issues’ use of Harry Mudd, Zefram Cochrane, and the Guardian of Forever). Thus was born Chang.

The tale following, in issue #11, proved remarkably prophetic, as it involved bottles containing the millennia-old discarded emotions of the first Vulcans to embrace logic. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek: Enterprise‘s “Awakening” would later show that the souls of deceased Vulcans (katras) are stored in bottle-like vessels called katric arks—something Wein, of course, could not have known.

Wein continued to display knowledge of The Original Series in Star Trek #12, in which Kirk, hoping to trick some pirates, claims to have taken a map from a man on Pollux IV (Apollo’s home in “Who Mourns for Adonais?”). Viewscreen graphics in Deep Space Nine‘s “The Muse” and “What You Leave Behind” indicate that the planet and its ruins became a tourist attraction following Apollo’s demise, so this jibes with Wein’s allusion. In addition, the starship crew utilizes the stolen Romulan cloaking device from “The Enterprise Incident.”

Star Trek #13 and 14 contain more episode references. In issue #13, a mysterious being called the Traveler claims to have studied with the Organians (from “Errand of Mercy”), and he displays abilities quite similar to those of another Traveler, from The Next Generation‘s “Where No One Has Gone Before.” Then, in issue #14, tribbles are cited as an example of the cosmos’ strangest life forms, and the Enterprise is assigned to escort an ambassador to the Omega System (Flint’s sanctuary in “Requiem for Methuselah”).

Wein’s penultimate tale, in Star Trek #15, is extremely similar to the storyline of “The Time Trap.” In both tales, the Enterprise and a Klingon vessel join forces to escape from a timeless void inhabited by stranded travelers from many worlds. The comic predated the cartoon episode by more than a year, so it was actually The Animated Series that was derivative in this case, not Gold Key. Finally, issue #16 references “The Conscience of the King,” but illogically so, as it involves a first-contact mission to Tarsus IV. Since that colony world had been the site of a mass execution by Governor Kodos back when Kirk was a young man, a first-contact story set during his captaincy makes little sense.

The Gold Key series takes its fair share of ribbing for the absurdity of its plots, its off-kilter dialogue, and so on, but there’s some genuinely good Trek among the dreck. Len Wein’s arrival elevated the writing quality thanks to his knowledge of the TV show—even if he didn’t always apply that knowledge in a manner consistent what the episodes. This was a turning point for the comic, and his successors, including Arnold Drake and George Kashdan, would create memorable new voyages for the starship crew that far exceeded those of Dick Wood, as we’ll begin exploring next week.

It’s amusing to note that Wein’s first issue, while referencing Lincoln, Alexander, and other historical figures, got something wrong about the period in which we currently live. Among the android replicas is one patterned after the brainwaves of Anton York, the 45^th President of the United States. If only York were a real person, we’d all have been a lot better off. On this point, reality trumped Wein’s prediction.

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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.