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.
123: Various Publishers, Part Two
Last time, this column looked back at comics that aren’t strictly Star Trek but are still relevant. These included pastiches, an adaptation of Fredric Brown’s original “Arena” short story, and comics otherwise connected to Trek without bearing the label. Now let’s take things a step further by revisiting comics based on the TV shows and films that inspired the 1960s series, as well as those the franchise influenced in turn. They’re a subset of Star Trek comic collecting that many never consider, yet they’re a journey with historical value.
“Arena” wasn’t the only preexisting story to guide Star Trek’s writing. Another was the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, directed for MGM by Fred M. Wilcox. Hailed as one of that decade’s greatest science-fiction yarns, it featured characters and plot points comparable to those of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Star Trek would mirror as well. Gene Roddenberry has acknowledged having drawn a great deal of inspiration from Forbidden Planet when writing “The Cage,” and that becomes evident when one watches the two films side by side.
The movie’s influence can also be viewed in episodes of Doctor Who, The Outer Limits, The Time Tunnel, The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Babylon 5 (more on that in a moment), and other shows. Much has been written about the connections between Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. Parallels can be found in Leslie Nielsen’s Kirk-like counterpart Commander Adams, Warren Stevens’s Leonard McCoy analogue Dr. Ostrow, Morbius’s plight mirroring that of Gary Mitchell (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”), the use of faster-than-light travel for space exploration, the naming of the United Planets, and other similarities.
Forbidden Planet helped to innovate Star Trek, so it’s fitting that Innovation would publish a comic adaptation of this proto-Star Trek movie in 1992. Scripted by David Campiti based on the film’s screenplay, the four-part miniseries was drawn by Dærick Gröss and was collected in trade paperback as Forbidden Planet: The Saga of the Krell. For comic readers interested in how the Star Trek mythos began, Innovation’s take on Forbidden Planet is well worth perusing. And you can round out your reading of this series with multiple comic adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Another influence on Star Trek’s creation was Wagon Train, a TV Western that aired on NBC from 1957 to 1962, then was revived on ABC for a second run that concluded in 1965. A top-rated show in its time, Wagon Train followed a horse-drawn wagon convoy traveling from Missouri to California, crossing the Midwestern Plains and the Rocky Mountains while en route to a new frontier.
Wagon Train aired 284 episodes during its eight-season run. The series centered around a core group of characters who faced adventures and perils during their travels, with guest actors playing one-off members of their wagon train, as well as a long list of adversaries and allies. Sound familiar? It should. Replace the wagons with a spaceship and the Rocky Mountains with space, and you’ve (sort of, kind of) got Star Trek.
Roddenberry famously pitched the show to studios as “Wagon Train to the stars,” hoping the popularity of Westerns in that era would help him sell the series if executives perceived it as cowboys with laser guns. In his 1964 network pitch, the Great Bird of the Galaxy described Star Trek as “a Wagon Train concept—built around characters who travel to worlds similar to our own.” It was much more than that, obviously, and Gene was being a bit disingenuous with his whittled-down description, but his ploy succeeded and the franchise was born.
Enter Dell Comics, Dell Publishing’s comic book arm. The company produced 1933’s Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, widely considered the first American comic book, then reigned as one of the world’s largest comic publishers during the 1950s. Dell partnered with Western Publishing and produced a range of titles under the Whitman Comics banner, including multiple licensed properties. Whitman was also known as Gold Key Comics, which published the very first Star Trek line.
In 1957, Dell began releasing tie-in comics based on Wagon Train, starting with three issues of its long-running anthology Four Color. The Wagon Train stories appeared in issues #895, #971, and #1019, before the TV show branched off as its own self-titled series that lasted for nine more issues, numbered #4–13. After a brief hiatus, the comic then returned as a four-issue Gold Key continuation in 1964, for a total of seventeen installments, all featuring photo covers spotlighting the regular cast—a style the publisher also utilized with its earliest Star Trek issues.
Forbidden Planet and Wagon Train weren’t the only sagas to inspire Star Trek’s creation, but they were certainly two of the most notable, along with C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels and A.E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle. Trek, in turn, influenced other franchises that followed, and three series of comics based on such franchises are noteworthy for this column’s purposes.
The first of these was DC Comics’ spinoff based on J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5. The television show aired five seasons from 1993 to 1998, along with six telefilms (The Gathering, In the Beginning, Thirdspace, The River of Souls, A Call to Arms, and The Legend of the Rangers) and the short-lived spinoffs Crusade and The Lost Tales. Despite a shaky start, Babylon 5 soon became one of television’s greatest science-fiction sagas of all time, with an animated continuation, Babylon 5: The Road Home, airing in 2023 and a new TV series rumored to reboot the universe in 2024.
Fans of Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine have noted many similarities between the two shows, involving their concepts, characters, titles, and more. Such comparisons were inevitable, given the controversy surrounding the series’ genesis. Straczynski has suggested that Paramount, after declining his Babylon 5 proposal, may have rushed a Trek-based version to television first, which the studio has denied. Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t much matter since each show was brilliant in its own right. Plus, both borrowed elements of other lore anyway, so the question becomes a bit moot.
In 1995, DC began publishing comics based on Babylon 5. These comprised an eleven-issue monthly series set during the early seasons, followed by a three-part miniseries, In Valen’s Name. A twelfth monthly chapter had been slated to feature regular character Marcus Cole, but the series was canceled before that issue could reach stores. Unlike most franchise creators, Straczynski—who penned an issue of DC’s Star Trek line that had a lot in common with Babylon 5—considered them part of the TV canon, even referencing one comic arc (involving a colony on Mars) on the show.
A fifteenth and final issue, this one a minicomic, was packaged with The Lost Tales for a 2007 DVD release exclusive to Best Buy. No publisher was indicated, but it’s likely not to have been DC by that point. A hundred-page graphic novel was also in the works from Star Trek publisher WildStorm, written by Straczynski himself. That project never saw the light of day, but the writer reportedly worked elements of his script into Crusade and The Legend of the Rangers.
Then there’s Galaxy Quest. Star Trek fans hardly need an introduction to the 1999 comedy starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman, for it’s as close to an actual Trek film as one might find. In fact, attendees at a Las Vegas Star Trek convention in 2013 ranked it as the seventh best Star Trek film of all time! The movie was a reverential Trek pastiche, built around not just the fictional show, but also the real-world careers of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and others in the years following the show’s cancelation, as well as the avid fanbase and convention industry that emerged.
In 2008, IDW published the five-issue miniseries Global Warning, written by Scott Lobdell and illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis. Picking up where the film left off, Global Warning involves a world-threatening crisis that takes place on the eve of Galaxy Quest’s TV relaunch, yet again demanding that the cast step up to save the day in their own unique way as actors. This was followed in 2015 by the four-part The Journey Continues, from writer Erik Burnham and artist Nacho Arranz, in which another extraterrestrial antagonist creates havoc for the cast.
Finally, Fox’s The Orville was conceived by creator and series lead Seth MacFarlane as an homage to Star Trek. The show serves as a parody of The Next Generation yet is also a solid science-fiction franchise in its own right—much like how The Princess Bride took friendly jabs at old swashbuckling films yet was a charming swashbuckler flick itself. The Orville owes much to Star Trek in terms of its visual aesthetic, storytelling approach, depictions of aliens, and core premise of a starship representing a vast alliance of planets exploring the galaxy and protecting mankind from outside threats.
MacFarlane had appeared in two episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, and The Orville is co-produced by three other Trek alumni: Brannon Braga, David A. Goodman, and Andre Bormanis. It has featured a long list of actors from Star Trek, notably series regular Penny Johnson Jerald (Kasidy Yates), as well as guest stars Tim Russ (Tuvok), Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi), Robert Picardo (the EMH), and John Billingsley (Phlox). The series’ first two seasons aired on Fox, after which the show moved over to Hulu for the third run, The Orville: New Horizons. The latter was supposed to span eleven episodes, but pandemic-related delays reduced that number by one, and MacFarlane instead turned the lost episode, “Sympathy for the Devil,” into a novel.
Dark Horse Comics began publishing stories continuing The Orville’s adventures in 2019. Since then, the company has released two four-issues miniseries and a pair of two-issue minis, all written by Goodman and drawn by David Cabeza. These twelve chapters have added six storylines to the mix: “New Beginnings,” “The Word of Avis,” “Launch Day,” “Heroes,” “Digressions,” and “Artifacts.” As with DC’s Babylon 5, the involvement of one of The Orville’s executive producers lends credibility to the comics being viewed as an extension of the show.
The Galaxy Quest comics are a mixed bag, but those based on Babylon 5 and The Orville are highly enjoyable continuations. Trek fans would find them fascinating, considering that one franchise (Babylon 5) had a long-standing rivalry with Star Trek, while the other two are intentional Trek pastiches. With a fourth season of The Orville possibly coming down the (Christopher) pike, the aforementioned Babylon 5 reboot now in the works, and persistent rumors of a Galaxy Quest TV series, it’s only a matter of time before more comics are announced for all three sagas. As for more Forbidden Planet or Wagon Train comics? Well, that’s doubtful… but as Spock would say, there are always possibilities.
Next week, this column will resume the ongoing discussion of bona fide Star Trek stories, with more chapters of IDW’s New Visions photocomics, courtesy of writer-artist John Byrne. See you then.
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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