Review: Star Trek: The New Adventures: Volume 1

Star Trek: The New Adventures: Volume 1 by Mike Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

But which one? ‘Cause you’ve got the original Enterprise from TOS, then came the renovated one in the first couple of movies. But that one got blowed up real good so then we had the Enterprise-A. Of course there’s Next Generations which had the Enterprise-D and E versions. Oh, and we got to see the Enterprise-B and C, too. Then there’s the Enterprise from the prequel series of the same name. So exactly which Enterprise are we talking about here? Kirk’s original Enterprise? Cool! Wait, it’s the one from the rebooted Abrams timeline though….

This is why nerds eventually lose their minds.

So yeah, this is a comic that takes place after the events of the 2009 Star Trek reboot featuring a young Captain Kirk and his original crew, and a lot of the stories are retellings of TOS like Where No Man Has Gone Before, The Galileo Seven, and The Return of the Archons. The twist is that since we’re in an alt-timeline things play out differently than the original versions.

This is a tricky proposition. If you don’t change things enough then you’re just doing a boring pointless remake. If you change to much then you risk messing with something that fans might feel very strongly about. (Into Darkness ran into this when they tried to do another version of the Khan storyline.)

Overall, these are pretty fun that come up with interesting changes based on the way things have already been shifted because of the events of the first movie. For example, McCoy isn’t in the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before but here he’s already on the ship so his presence changes how it all goes even if much of it is still familiar. The Return of the Archons takes this even further because it seems like even the backstory of the events there are altered which would have taken place long before the timeline was changed. So that’s the writer essentially rebooting a piece of Trek history which is then used to set up a whole new plot thread going forward. Their version of The Trouble With the Tribbles also happens very differently, and there’s another story that’s entirely new and based off the events of the first movie so they aren’t just doing updates of old stuff.

The artwork is very good and really helps sell all this. They’ve got the look and feel of the new cast and Enterprise down exactly, and then they introduce other cool sci-fi action. A comic book adaptation is never going to be as satisfying as the move or TV show its based on, but this one does provide some fun supplemental action if you liked the Abrams version of the characters. (And if you don’t, I really don't want to hear about it.)

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