An ongoing discussion of how the comics provide prequels, sequels, and tie-ins to the Star Trek episodes and films, soon to be a book from BearManor Media. Click here to view an archive of this article series.
95: IDW Publishing, 2010
Writing a column about how Star Trek comics provide prequels and sequels to the films and movies usually presents little challenge. After all, once you get past the Gold Key years and the British strips, many of the comics, regardless of the publisher, directly connected to the onscreen voyages, providing plenty to document. But every now and then, a story comes along that is meant to be standalone. It might be well written and illustrated, but considering this column’s prequel-sequel focus, it poses a dilemma when it comes to finding something substantiative to say. (Blogging about blogging: the easiest way to fake it.)
IDW’s Ghosts fell into this category, and so does Star Trek: Burden of Knowledge. The four-issue miniseries, from writers Scott and David Tipton and artists Federica Manfredi, Riccardo Sisti, Nicola Zanni, Andrea Priorini, Joe Corroney, and Michael Stribling, is set during the 1960s show, specifically in the latter part of the five-year mission, given the presence of The Animated Series’ Arex. Each issue tells its own story, with the fourth chapter dovetailing back to the first, but none are prequels or sequels to onscreen Star Trek. That’s not to say Burden of Knowledge isn’t enjoyable, though. In fact, it’s a hoot.
As with their work on Klingons: Blood Will Tell, Alien Spotlight, Intelligence Gathering, Mirror Images, Spock: Reflections, Fool’s Gold, and Captain’s Log, the Tipton brothers deftly capture the personalities and inflections of all the main characters. Their use of humor hits the mark every time, and the covers are some of Corroney’s most gorgeously lifelike. Still, it’s a risky topic for this column since there aren’t any sequels or prequels. But as “Return to Tomorrow” so eloquently reminded us, risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her. There might not be episode follow-ups, but there are tie-ins worth pointing out.
In issue #1, the Enterprise visits Mygdalus 3. Virtili ships, intending to nab the leader Erbus over a business dispute, inadvertently kidnap Kirk, Spock, and Leonard McCoy, causing Bones to mutter, “Do you know how many times I’ve ended up locked in a cell with you two?” It’s a great commentary on the fact that the trio have often been jailed together (see “Patterns of Force,” “The Omega Glory,” “Catspaw,” “Return of the Archons,” “By Any Other Name,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” and other episodes, as well as Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). Their list of incarcerations must rival Harry Mudd’s, and the fact that their capture this time is entirely accidental makes the scenario even funnier.
Kirk offers to mediate between the Mygdalians and the Virtili, but they hastily decline as though hiding something (exactly what isn’t revealed until the fourth chapter). The Virtili are giant birds with comical faces, and their involvement provides the story’s humorous moments. In one scene, Spock attempts a Vulcan neck pinch on a Virtili guard, only to have the unaffected alien ask in annoyance “What do you think you’re doing?” In later panels, the exasperated Virtili captain complains to Kirk about how the botched kidnapping has complicated matters, as though causing an interstellar incident is somehow the abductees’ fault. It’s a classic Star Trek comedy routine.
The Star Trek franchise has introduced relatively few sentient ornithoids. A humanoid bird species appeared in “The Cage” and “The Squire of Gothos,” while “Catspaw” revealed Korob and Sylvia to be bird-like pipe-cleaner marionettes in their native form. The Animated Series added the Aurelians (“Yesteryear”) and the Skorr (“The Jihad”) to the mix, Star Trek: Enterprise revealed the extinct Xindi-Avians in its third season, and Betelgeusians have shown up in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and on Star Trek: Discovery. With Burden of Knowledge, the Virtili join their feathered ranks.
Admiral James Komack (mentioned in “This Side of Paradise,” then featured in “Amok Time” and the 2009 Star Trek film) gets a name-check in this issue, as the admiral assigns the Enterprise to assist in Mygdalus 3’s anticipated entry into the Federation. Due to the planet’s medical and engineering advances, Komack is emphatic that admittance run smoothly. Given the disastrous events of the first and fourth issues, it’s a good bet he won’t be happy with Kirk’s report.
The second issue features no overt connections to onscreen stories. The crew undertakes a first-contact mission on a world where cybernetic implants mentally link the population. Privacy-seeking dissenters have removed their receivers, and the government is forcing them to rejoin the mental Internet, known as the Thoughtwork. As the rebels are re-implanted, chaos results as individuality spreads worldwide, forcing the leaders to hastily disconnect them. If only they’d watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, they’d have seen what happens when you reintegrate liberated Borg back into the Collective.
Issue #3 teases a sequel to a classic episode, with the Enterprise bound for Janus VI, home of the Hortas, to check on the miners’ progress since “The Devil in the Dark.” Alas, an urgent order from Starfleet to investigate the disappearance of a cruise ship delays the mission. As such, readers never get to see the meatball-pizza-like Hortas happily tunneling away so that exploitative humans can get obscenely wealthy in a future society supposedly not based on capitalism.
As with the Virtili, this issue relies on the humorous depiction of an alien species—this time, the Tellarites. After Andorian engineers perform maintenance on the Enterprise’s computers, the ship begins to think like an Andorian, nearly instigating a war with Tellar Prime. Kirk offends the Tellarites by implying their responsibility for the cruise ship’s destruction, and war seems imminent until Spock realizes the vessel’s loss was due to an accident. Kirk defuses the situation by belittling the Tellarites’ ability to solve the mystery he’s already solved, then letting them take credit after they solve it as well—a brilliant use of that species’ devotion to arguing.
The easily incensed Tellarite captain is hilarious, and the computer upgrade creating problems for Kirk recalls “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” in which the computer called him “dear” after an overhaul on the female-dominated planet Cygnet XIV left it with an affectionate personality. Between these two cases and the Bynar incident (The Next Generation’s “11001001”), not to mention the newspaper strips’ “Husian Gambit,” you’d think Starfleet would stop outsourcing starship maintenance. It never ends well.
The Orions make an appearance in the final issue, in which the Enterprise responds to a distress call from one of its own crewmen, Jason Thompson, whom the Orions found hiding aboard their freighter. The Orions are drawn consistent with their appearance in Mirror Images and Spock: Reflections, with their armor modeled after the outfits featured in “The Pirates of Orion,” thankfully minus the glaring neon green from the cartoon. The problem is, there’s already a Jason Thompson on duty… so who’s this other guy? McCoy determines a transporter replicant was created on Mygdalus 3 (a century before Thomas Riker’s creation in “Second Chances”).
The Enterprise revisits that world, where Kirk rescues 200 more Thompson doubles, no doubt making the next Thompson family reunion a bit awkward. Spock observes that it would be interesting to trace the replicants’ lives in the years to come, recalling his line from “Space Seed” regarding Khan’s people which set up the premise of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: “It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years, and to learn what crop has sprung from the seed you planted today.” Maybe someday the Tiptons will write a sequel titled Star Trek: The Wrath of Thompson. If so, this column stands ready to document it.
By story’s end, the crew exposes a plot to duplicate many different species for medical procedures and experimentation, including Klingons (with purple uniforms, like in the 1970s cartoon), Gorns (from “Arena”), humans, and more, all supplied by the Virtili—which is what they were hiding back in issue #1. Once freed, the Gorns and Klingons immediately slaughter each other in a massive bloodbath, which should absolutely happen in the next theatrical film but almost certainly will not.
Now, prepare yourself for one of the most unusual Trek tales to come out of IDW, crafted again by the Tiptons and involving… flesh-eating zombies! That’s right, it’s the warping dead. The crossover series Infestation sees the ravenous undead infecting multiple IDW properties—not only Star Trek, but also Transformers, Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe, and more. It’s a lot of fun, and we’ll take a hungry bite out of it in the next installment.
Looking for more information about Star Trek comics? Check out these resources:
- My ongoing column for Titan Books’ Star Trek Explorer magazine
- The Complete Star Trek Comics Index, curated 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 (Sequart, 2014)
- Star Trek: A Comics History, by Alan J. Porter (Hermes Press, 2009)
- The Star Trek Comics Weekly page on Facebook
Rich Handley has written, co-written, co-edited, or contributed to dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Planet of the Apes, Watchmen, Back to the Future, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Stargate, Dark Shadows, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Red Dwarf, Blade Runner, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman, the Joker, classic monsters, and more. He has also been a magazine writer and editor for nearly three decades. Rich edited Eaglemoss’s Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection, and he currently writes articles for Titan’s Star Trek Explorer magazine, as well as books for an as-yet-unannounced role-playing game. Learn more about Rich and his work at richhandley.com.
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