Marvel Comics's Star Trek Overview Part 1: Introduction and Star Trek (1980-1982)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So, a year or so ago I did an overview series on the DC Comics line of Star Trek comics that were published from 1984 until 1996. At the time I talked about doing something similar with the Marvel Comics line at some point. Well, here I am, ready to dive into the world of Star Trek as published by Marvel. Because there are two eras of Marvel Star Trek, the first from 1980 until 1982, and the second from 1996 until 1998, I have a wider variety of series to talk about with the Marvel run, but not nearly as many ancilliary material to cover, as the Marvel run didn't have annuals or specials. They had one-shots that came out two to three times a year during the entirety of Marvel's second run, and that's it. So this will be a slightly shorter series than the DC one. I also don't have as big a history with Marvel's run with Star Trek than I do with DC's, so chances are the posts themselves won't be quite as long either. With all of that out of the way, let's get into it.

Marvel Comics's relationship with Star Trek began in 1979 when Paramount transferred the comic book license from Western Publishing/Gold Key Comics to Marvel as part of the merchandising campaign for the then upcoming Star Trek feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It's interesting to note that the cover of issue #1 is the first real indication that Star Trek, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture all take place in the 23rd Century as Roddenberry had been careful to avoid tying the setting to a particular century, which was completely abandoned by the late '80s when Star Trek: The Next Generation started airing.

The writers on this book are some of the best writers that Marvel employed at the time. The movie adaptation was written by Marv Wolfman, who was about to go over to DC and revitalize the Teen Titans alongside George Perez with The New Teen Titans, Mike W. Barr, who would go on to write some of the early Star Trek comics for DC in 1984, Tom DeFalco, Martin Pasko, Michael Fleischer, Alan Brennert, who wrote a bunch of Batman stories for DC in the early '80s, including two that were collected in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, and J.M. DeMatteis, who is well known in the comic book industry. 

The artists on the book are equally the best that Marvel had at the time. At least some of them are to me. Dave Cockrum did the artwork for Max Collins's run on Batman in the late '80s, and co-created Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Mystique among others, alongside Len Wein and Roy Thomas when they revived X-Men, after the book had been nothing but reprints since the late '60s, in 1975. Gil Kane is the only other artist on this list that I'm even vaguely familiar with. He helped revamp Green Lantern in 1959, which introduced Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps. He also did the art for the three issue anti-drug story arc in The Amazing Spider-Man in 1971. The other artists on this book are Mike Nasser, Leo Duranona, Joe Brozowski, Luke McDonnell, and Ed Hannigan, who has done some work for both DC and Marvel in the '80s and '90s.

Following the three issue adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the comic continued with its own stories starting with issue #4, following the events of the movie, with Kirk back in command of the Enterprise and the ship on its next five year mission (presumably). From this point on there were mostly single issue stories, though there was one more two parter, which was told in issues 4 and 5.

 Unlike the DC Star Trek comics, I only ever had three issues of the initial Marvel run from the '80s. Issues #11 (pictured above), and #17 were given to me as gifts by my grandmother, and issue #8 was given to me by my sister as a birthday present sometime in the mid to late 2000s. They were good, they just didn't stand out to me the way the DC comics did. Mostly because they didn't add any recurring characters, so not only were the stories bland and uninteresting, but you only had the original Enterprise crew, and maybe Chief DiFalco, Janice Rand and Doctor Chapel as recurring characters. They also didn't do any follow-up storylines from episodes of the TV show, or even that first movie

The series ended with issue #18 in 1982, only a few months before The Wrath of Khan came out. At that point Marvel lost the comic book license for Star Trek, and it was transferred over to DC Comics, though the new movie didn't have a comic book adaptation, so DC's Star Trek series wouldn't begin publication until early 1984, as I covered in that comic book overview.

The comic book adaptation of The Motion Picture had originally been published as a single volume in Marvel's Super Special #15 in 1979, before the movie came out, before being split up into three parts for the comic book series in 1980. Besides that, this series was only ever collected in the Eaglemoss hardcover collection. The series itself isn't hard to track down as I've seen it in comic book bins at conventions, and other geek and comic book centric sales, but the collected editions are probably very expensive given that Eaglemoss is out of business.

And that's the first Star Trek comic book series from Marvel Comics. Next time I'll be talking about DC letting the comic book license for Star Trek go and Marvel reacquirring it in 1996, when I discuss the first series to be published under the now defunct Paramount Comics imprint that Marvel did specifically for Star Trek comics. 

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with another review. I'm not sure how often I'll be putting this overview series out, but I'm aiming for once a week for nine weeks. So until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.