DC Comics's Star Trek Overview Part 2: Star Trek Annuals 1-3 (1985-1988)

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with part two of my DC Comics's Star Trek overview series. Today I'm gonna be covering the three Annual issues that DC Comics published for Star Trek between 1985 and 1988 as well as some other Star Trek material that covers events in these Annuals. So let's get into it.

Star Trek Annual #1 was published in 1985, about a year after the main series got started. Unlike the main series, the Annuals took place before the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). This issue takes place as Kirk first takes command of the Enterprise following Captain Pike's promotion to Fleet Captain (most likely Commodore or Admiral in modern Star Trek's ranking system). It does have a wraparound story set during Kirk and Spock's command of the Excelsior and the Surak, which I mentioned in the previous part of this overview. They tell Saavik the story of their first mission together onboard the original Enterprise, and it also flashes back to Robert April's time as captain and, unless a novel mentions it before this, this issue is the first mention of Pike being April's first officer on the Enterprise, proving that the people writing Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds take elements from the older comics and retool them for the TV shows. Which is cool. I've only seen this issue through scans and a review or two on YouTube. Basically the crew deals with a hostile alien race that chose to capture Pike due to Pike's earlier encounter while April was in command of the ship. The wraparound is that the same alien race is returning to Federation space, twenty years later.

Annual #2 takes place at the end of Kirk's five year mission with the story ending with the Enterprise returning to spacedock and the crew departing with Kirk turning command over to Will Decker for the refit process. The story itself is the ship getting captured by Klingons at Talos IV, with the Talosians being used to torture the crew. Pretty dark for a Star Trek comic published by DC in 1985. What makes it weird is that Scotty grew his moustache and Decker is wearing the pajama looking uniform from The Motion Picture. This issue is collected in the The Best of Star Trek trade paperback that I mentioned last time, which I have in my collection.

The third Annual focuses on Scotty. It tells the story about his relationship with a woman he'd known since childhood as she passed away while Scotty was away on the Enterprise-A shortly after the events of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). This was the final Annual that DC published for the series before they retooled it to take place after Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), and eliminated all of the original characters like Konom. It was also collected in The Best of Star Trek.

That's it for the three Annuals, but I wanted to discuss something else with this post. One of the problems that Star Trek novels and comics have that the Star Wars Expanded Universe, be it Legends or Canon, try hard not to do, is that both sides don't talk to each other so they end up telling the exact same story multiple times. For example there are three or four different versions of how the Enterprise returned from it's first five year mission with Kirk in command. Some of them have similarities, but they're all written by different people and are different enough that they can't line up with one another to tell one cohesive story. There's also at least two, if not more, versions of how Kirk took command of the Enterprise from Pike. So I just wanted to take a look at some of them while I'm here.

The first is the novel, Enterprise: The First Adventure by Vonda N. McIntyre. The book was published in 1986, a year after Star Trek Annual #1 was published. Like the Annual, the novel details the beginning of Kirk's five year mission onboard the Enterprise. Unlike the comic book version, this story begins with Kirk having been severely injured during the end of his last command, with Gary Mitchell, who was to be Kirk's first officer, in a coma. Otherwise it starts with everything else being the same, Kirk being a jerk, Scotty and Uhura being upset with him, Kirk not getting along with Spock as Spock was forced on him as his first officer, and Sulu not knowing why he was assigned to the Enterprise as helmsman in the first place. 

Next up we have The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard, which was published in 1989. This novel detailed the end of Kirk's five year mission and detailed where each crewmember went once the Enterprise returned to spacedock. Decker makes an appearance, but there's no mission on their way back to spacedock. This focuses more on what happened after Kirk gets promoted to Admiral and Spock and McCoy both resign from Starfleet. Though this is only the first book in a four novel subseries within the TOS novel series published by Pocket Books. The subseries bridged the gap between the end of Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974) and the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

In 1995 DC Comics published Star Trek #75. This issue was the third and final chapter in a story arc that detailed specific moments in the relationship of James T. Kirk and Carol Marcus, but it also gave a different account of the events that happened immediately after the Enterprise returned to spacedock after it's five year mission under Kirk. It covers a shorter span of time than the Lost Years novels, but it also focuses more on Kirk and Carol's relationship than anything else, aside from Kirk's promotion to Admiral.

In 2009 IDW Comics, who had gained the publishing license for Star Trek in 2007 following WildStorm Comics relinquishing the license in 2001, published a five issue limited series called Mission's End, which details the final mission of the Enterprise at the end of the five year mission, and it ends with Kirk and the crew going their separate ways after the ship has returned to spacedock.

Finally, from 2019 to 2021 IDW published a 25 issue series called Star Trek: Year Five. This series chronicles the final year of the five year mission, with issue #24 seeing the Enterprise returning to Earth after five years away. I've never read this series, but from what I've read about it on Memory Alpha, issue #25 is an epilogue which goes into what the crew did during the Enterprise's refit between the series and the movies.

That's all for today folks. I thought I'd discuss some of the other stories that chronicled the same period of events as the first two Annuals of this comic book series did just because I knew this post would be much shorter than the other sections of this overview otherwise. Next week I'll be diving into the comic book adaptations of the Star Trek movies that DC did from 1984 until 1994. So until then have a wonderful evening and I'll talk to you later. Take care.