WildStorm's Star Trek Comic Book Series Overview

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with another Star Trek comic book overview. Unlike the DC and Marvel overviews that I did in 2022 and 2023, this one is going to be a single post as I'm talking about the WildStorm Comics run that came out between 2000 and 2001. And because all of the comics came out over the course of a year and a half, there won't be that much of an organization to how I talk about these issues. Basically I'm going to talk about them by series, beginning with TOS and going to Voyager. One more thing about these comics as well. I've never read a single issue of the WildStorm Star Trek comics. I didn't even know about them until over a decade after WildStorm lost/gave up the Star Trek license. So I'm not going to have a whole lot to talk about with them. Let's get into it.

The TOS run of WildStorm's Star Trek comic book series, is the shortest of the entire run. WildStorm put out two one-shots, All of Me and Enter the Wolves, and that's it. The first issue has to do with a scientist who creates a device that can bring people from parallell universes into the main Star Trek Universe, so as an example, it could bring Spock from the Mirror Universe into the regular universe, and the Enterprise is sent to investigate and stop him if necessary. The second comic tells the story of Spock and Sarek's relationship during the Lost Era, or the 70 years between Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. All of it was mentioned in the episodes of TNG that Sarek and Spock appeared in. The short version is Sarek opposes the Cardassian petition to join the Federation and is a sequel to the 1994 novel, Sarek, by A.C. Crispin, who also wrote this issue. What's bizarre about that, is in actual canon, the Cardassians never petitioned to join the Federation, and so Spock and Sarek disagreed over the war. Which makes more sense, since I highly doubt the Cardassians would join the Federation as a member world, given they'd lose their autonomy as the Cardassian Union. 

Next came the TNG series, which had three one shots, and two four issue mini-series in it's line. The first was the four issue mini-series, Perchance to Dream, followed by a one-shot called Embrace the Wolf which was the TNG sequel to the TOS episode, "Wolf in the Fold". Then another four mini-series came out called The Killing Shadows, followed by a second one-shot called The Gorn Crisis, which is the only WildStorm Star Trek comic I heard about as an article on it was published in a 2001 issue of the magazine, Star Trek Communicator. What's interesting about this one-shot graphic novel is that it was written by Kevin J. Anderson and his wife, Rebecca Moesta, who wrote the Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights series together from 1995 to 1998, and who each had individual writing credits on '90s Star Wars material. The final one-shot, Forgiveness, was published in 2001, wrapping up the TNG comics.

DS9 also had a comic book by WildStorm. However, it was a single four issue mini-series called N-Vector. I really don't know very much about these comics and trying to write a synopsis for each one-shot and mini-series would make this post longer than it needs to be. If you want to learn more there are synopses for all of these comics on Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki. As for WildStorm itself, aside from seeing ads for them in the comics that DC published in the 2000's, as the publisher became an imprint of DC in 1999, and reading a run of Gen13 and the 2005 Danger Girl mini-series, Back in Black, I'm not as familiar with WildStorm, being that they weren't part of the DC Universe when I was introduced to comics in the early 90's, and they were more mature and not appropriate for someone of my age in 1992. Even when I was in high school, WildStorm books weren't that easy to find compared to Marvel and DC, and again, because of my preferences, I wasn't interested in any of the WildStorm books. Even now, I have no desire to read comics from WildStorm.

At some point during this era, WildStorm did a four issue TNG/DS9 crossover comic called Divided We Fall. This story is set in the same continuity of the DS9 relaunch novel series, which began in 2000, so the comic involves the characters introduced in the novels. Which is interesting.

The Voyager comic consisted of three one-shots and one mini-series. The second one-shot was actually the comic book adaptation of the video game, Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force, which came out in 2000 for the PC and the Mac, and 2001 for the PlayStation 2. The mini-series is also only three issues, instead of the four issues that the TNG and DS9 mini-series had. 

In January, 2001, a one-shot special issue was published. It contains six stories set in different eras. All four live action shows that existed in 2001 were represented in this issue.

The final comic I can talk about in this overview is Star Trek: New Frontier - Double Time. Star Trek: New Frontier was a series of novels, novellas, and eBooks written by Peter David that Pocket Books published between 1997 and 2015. Unlike other Star Trek novels, this series didn't include any of the core cast members as the central characters in the series. They might show up from time to time, but the series focused on original character, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, and the crew of various starships called Excalibur. Calhoun's crew consists of side characters from various shows and books. Including Captain Elizabeth Shelby from "The Best of Both Worlds" and Zak Kebron, a Brikarian Starfleet Officer who was a classmate of Worf's at Starfleet Academy in the first three books in the Young Reader series, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Starfleet Academy. I actually wanna do a blog post on New Frontier sometime because it's pretty cool, but the series was created in response to the criticism that nothing could really happen in the Star Trek novels as this was before any of the relaunch series began publication and the TNG movies were still coming out alongside new seasons of DS9 and Voyager. With none of these characters showing up in the shows anymore, you could develop them and have them change and grow in ways that the main characters from the TV shows and movies couldn't outside of the shows and movies.

WildStorm had the shortest run of any Star Trek comic book publisher, being that it really only lasted a year to a year and a half with no ongoing monthly series. I think that's because by the time WildStorm had the license, Star Trek was becoming less and less popular, and with WildStorm being not very well known at the time, and Star Trek comics also not being as well known by 2000, it made sense that the comics probably didn't sell very well. Especially because the TV shows and movies were still coming out on a regular basis, so there wasn't that thirst for Star Trek stories in other mediums that there would be after Enterprise went off the air in 2005. 

I honestly don't know if I'll do an overview series on the Star Trek comics published by IDW. Mainly because there are just so many of them and most of them are mini-series and one shots like WildStorm published. Plus, even though I have read some of the IDW runs from the last five or six years, I haven't read any of them from 2007 to about 2018 or 2019, so that's a huge chunk of the comics I haven't read. So I don't have alot of history with the IDW comics, but I definitely have more than I do with the WildStorm and late 90's Marvel runs. We'll see though. In the meantime, I'll be back with more posts in the near future. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.