Star Trek Comics Weekly #8

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

8: UK Comic Strips, 1969-1979

While Gold Key Comics was publishing its monthly Star Trek comics books for U.S. fans in the 1960s and 1970s, British readers could access these stories via 20 or so hardcover and softcover collections, as well as serialized in nearly 100 weekly issues of TV Comic and Mighty TV Comic. But the Brits were also treated to original, exclusive comic strips not sold in the United States. This long-forgotten lore remained unavailable to American audiences until the past few years, when IDW reprinted all of the strips as a trio of beautifully designed hardcovers titled Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics. Eaglemoss then reprinted those editions in four volumes of the Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection.

In 1969, six months prior to the TV show’s arrival in the United Kingdom, the strips debuted in Joe 90: Top Secret. Based on Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation puppet TV show, the newsprint magazine lasted for 34 issues, with Star Trek as a featured strip. Once Joe 90 merged with TV21, the comic was renamed TV21 & Joe 90, with Star Trek its most popular title. The publisher changed the name back to TV21 as of issue #37, then another change took place in 1971, following TV21 issue #105, when the comic merged with Valiant to become Valiant and TV21. Star Trek again survived the merger, inhabiting the center spread for 118 more issues until being dropped in 1973.

The strips spanned 37 serialized storylines published in 257 weekly magazines by City Magazines, Martspress, and IPC Magazines. Additional strips appeared in the 1969 Joe 90 annual, three TV21 annuals, the 1972 Valiant Summer Special, the 1978 Mighty TV Comic and 1979 TV Comic annuals, and the June 27, 1970, issue of Radio Times (a British analog to the United States’ TV Guide), courtesy of Century 21, City Magazines, World Distributors, IPC, Polystyle Publications, and BBC Worldwide.

Adherence to the show’s concepts was practically nil, with the crew acting and speaking hilariously out of character. But the artwork was a different story; though inaccurate compared to how things looked onscreen, much of it was gorgeously illustrated. Few connections exist between the strips and specific episodes, though the first six Joe 90: Top Secret storylines and the 1969 annual feature Dave Bailey, a navigator who showed up in only a single episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The elevation of such a minor one-off character to regular status was likely due to the writer and artist receiving limited reference materials and thus, understandably, mistaking Bailey for a main character.

Two storylines, published in TV21 & Joe 90 #7–17, have a surprising connection to “Spock’s Brain,” as the Enterprise crew searches for new planets in the Sigma Draconis Group. Why they’d need to do this is unclear, since in “Spock’s Brain,” an Enterprise screen displayed a map of Sigma Draconis’s nine worlds—yet in the strips, they discover two more. Another storyline, appearing in TV21 #74–77, shares similarities with “Bread and Circuses,” with the Enterprise visiting yet another world modeled after the Roman Empire and ruled by a leader called Caesar (who happens to be a robot in the strips).

The only other notable tie-in between the strips and the TV show can be found in the above-noted Radio Times issue, which contained a one-page Trek strip from artist Frank Bellamy, utilizing onscreen dialogue from “The Apple” involving Kirk teasing Spock about resembling Satan, much to the Vulcan’s annoyance. When I helped IDW put together its reprint books, I amused myself by dubbing this one-pager “A Bite of the Apple.”

Considering how long the British strips ran, it’s remarkable how few connections can be made between this material and the TV show. The strips appeared weekly for nearly five years, yet other than Bailey’s inclusion, the tenuous “Spock’s Brain” connection, and a single page adapting “The Apple,” the series pretty much ignored televised continuity entirely. A few stories involved mustache-twirling plots hatched by the Klingons or the Romulans, but they always looked and acted differently than on TV, thanks to the creative teams’ unfamiliarity with the show.

For years, the British strips and Gold Key tales were all that was available in terms of Star Trek comics. Though certainly fun to read for their nostalgic value, neither can be described as a masterpiece, for neither was overly Trek-like. Lurking behind the licensing corner, however, were Marvel’s first monthly comic and the Los Angeles Times’ newspaper strips, whose stories carried far more concrete connections to the first two TV shows—and to the first two films. Those we’ll cover soon. But first, tune in next week when we’ll examine comic-related odds and ends published in the 1970s.

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: 30th 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.