Star Trek: The Next Generation #2 (1988) Christmas Comic Book Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back for another comic book review. Today's comic is going to be Star Trek: The Next Generation #2 from 1988, the only Star Trek comic to be Christmas themed. So without further ado, let's see how Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D deals with the Grinches, and no, that's not a joke. Let's get into it, with Spoilers!

Following the events of issue #1, the Enterprise-D is enroute to Starbase 33 for maintenance when they're waylaid by a ship crewed by an unknown race of beings. At the same time the crew is celebrating Christmas with Picard, Troi, Yar, the Crushers, the Bickleys (I'll get to them later), and La Forge joining in on the celebrations while Riker and Worf remain on the Bridge to handle things with the new race they just encountered. But things take a turn for the worst when a strange phenomenon is discovered aboard the Federation flagship and reveals just who the crew's new alien friends truly are.

Wow, I actually did a summary of the issue. Lol. As I mentioned in part 4 of my DC Comics's Star Trek Overview, the first six issue mini-series published for TNG in 1988 is the weirdest series of them all. Mainly because Mike Carlin, who was the writer on all six issues of the mini-series, did stuff that no other Star Trek comic would ever do, akin to what Gold Key Comics did with their TOS series in the '60s. Though I don't think the Gold Key TOS comics ever had the crew of the Enterprise meet a race of Grinches at Christmastime. They would definitely have a couple like the Bickleys in the series though.

Wesley Crusher is actually annoying in this comic book series, though he isn't AS annoying in this issue. As I mentioned in my series overview, these issues were written several months before the TV show even aired and all Carlin had to go on was the scripts for the first five or six episodes. Because of this the characters, while they look like their TV show counterparts, they don't act like them. That includes Data, who acts more like a child or someone who doesn't fit in with their peers. And that just makes Wesley more unbearable than the way Wil Wheaton portrayed the character after "Encounter at Farpoint" and "The Naked Now", which are the only two episodes where Wesley is annoying in the show. 

The artwork is decent, though I'm not sure about the crew's off-duty outfits. Troi's dress is the only one that makes sense. Picard's jacket doesn't and neither do Beverly Crusher's, Yar's, or Data's. Wesley and La Forge's still feel like how many creators portrayed futuristic clothing to be at the time this issue was published. It actually reminds me of Kryptonian clothing shown in the Superman comics from the '50s, right up to when John Byrne revamped Krypton and the Kryptonians in Superman: The Man of Steel #1 in 1986, only a year before this issue was published. 

I also find it interesting that the issue is titled "Spirit in the Sky!". I don't know if Carlin, or series editor Robert Greenberger, named it after the 1969/1970 Norman Greenbaum song, "Spirit in the Sky". Mostly because Carlin doesn't even mention in his 2007 interview with Star Trek Magazine whether it was him or Greenberger who came up with the names for the issues. It's also something that I don't know if other comic book writers have talked about either. Like is it the writers who comes up with the titles for the issues, or is it up to Editorial to come up with them?

Overall this is an okay issue. These early TNG comic book issues are pretty weird and aren't the greatest. It's not the fault of Carlin, the artists or the editor. They were rushed into production and all they had to go on was production stills, which is why Picard and the rest of the main characters still look the way they would on the TV show, and scripts for the early episodes of the first season since "Encounter at Farpoint" hadn't even aired yet when Carlin began writing the comics. With Eaglemoss having gone under I don't know how easy it's going to be to get this issue. I was lucky because I was able to get the trade paperback collection of the mini-series, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Beginnings, that DC published in 1996, but it's not in print anymore, and I think even IDW's reprint of the trade is out of print now since it was published in 2013. But you might find this issue or either of the trade paperback collections of the whole series at conventions.

That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of the first two episodes of Willow, a Disney+ series that serves as a sequel/follow-up to the 1988 Ron Howard film of the same name, starring Warwick Davis as the titular character. So until then have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.