Writer: Dave Wood
Artist: Nevio Zaccara
The officially licensed Star Trek comics by Gold Key are a curious nostalgia relic. They are, by many standards, not very good, but they have a lot of interesting and unique qualities, and they also served to satiate a lot of young Trekkies in a time when reruns were less common and home video a pipe dream.
Licensed comics tended to be a cheap, ill-regarded affair in the 1960s. A TV show or movie's popularity could be relatively flash in the pan, and the lead time on making comics is long, especially then. So comics companies put them out quickly and cheaply. They were cash-ins. Gold Key might not have been the bottom of comic book publishers in the 1960s, but they were near it. They specialized in licensed titles, although they did have a few original works as well, and were firm believers in the then-standard industry idea that you had an audience for your comics for four to five years tops before the kids grew out of it, and thus could save money by reprinting old stories ad infinitum.
Their Star Trek series is remembered well almost as much for what it got wrong as what it did right. Early issues featured graphically impressive photo-collage covers made up of a combination of early publicity photos as well as stills from the series. For example, the cover to issue #1 has a post-pilot, pre-series publicity photo of Spock, and then a common still of the Enterprise orbiting a planet and a still of Kirk and Sulu, likely from "The Squire of Gothos", demonstrating the lime green colour of their uniforms -- which appeared gold once captured on film. The graphic title logo adorned many pieces of early Trek merchandise, and is fondly remembered with nostalgia today. The art inside, by Italian Nevio Zaccara, is impressive and photorealistic, despite primitive colouring processes amid other inaccuracies.
Zaccara had never seen the show and was operating solely from publicity photos provided to him. Thus the collars on the uniforms are very high, drawn almost like an undershit as in the new Star Trek movies, Spock's eyebrows are not fully pointed (NBC airbrushed his eyebrows to be less severe in early publicity so as not to alarm Christian viewers), the Enterprise tends to have rocket fire shooting out from the back of its warp nacelles, and any show elements not present in publicity photos have their appearances merely guessed at. That said, when it comes to those things whose appearance he did know, Zaccara produced fantastic likenesses, putting many later Star Trek comics artists to shame.
This first issue is scripted by Dick Wood, an experienced comic book writer, but its clear that he also had perhaps never seen the series, and was maybe working off a copy of the series bible or some other provided reference material. The Enterprise is exploring Galaxy Alpha, yes a whole other galaxy, and so far it seems devoid of life. Yep, whole galaxy. But they discover a single world, teeming with plant life, so the ship dips into the atmosphere (you heard me) to investigate.
A cloud of spores attaches to the ship, eating through the hull, and attacking Dr. McCoy's guinea pigs (literal guinea pigs in his lab), turning them into plant beings! McCoy's likeness, by the way, is good, but he's depicted in the lime-green command uniform. Spock wants to analyse the spores to determine their cause, while Kirk takes a landing party down to the planet to investigate it. The team consists of Kirk, McCoy, two "redshirts", and Janice Rand making a rare appearance in other media. Of course, this can be chalked up to the issue's inspiration in early Trek publicity materials, where Rand was featured often as she was going to be a major character. Luckily for us continuity geeks, the issue has a stardate consistent with the period in season one when she was still on the show. Amusingly, her basketweave beehive hairdo is handled by the colouring team as if it's a red bonnet she wears on her head.
Zaccara gives the landing party special outfits, backpacks, and gear similar to what was seen in "The Cage" and for all the flaws of this comic the one advantage it has over the show is the unlimited budget of visuals a comic book offers. The planet is one that's teeming with living vegetation. One of the redshirts gets hit by the spores early and transformed into a plant. Then the team is attacked by a big meat-eating plant, but are saved by a tree monster that turns out to have been the transformed crewman, who then dies.
After some investigation, it turns out there's an entire species of sentient plants who have houses and societies and all the rest. Janice gets nabbed by a big tentacle plant monster (of course) and put into a "cattle pen" with a bunch of actual mammals, who it turns out are raised as food for the sentient plants. Kirk saves her by ordering Spock to fire on the cattle pen, and then the team is beamed aboard. But Spock is worried about the dangerous transformative spores travelling through space to inhabited worlds (aren't we in a whole other galaxy? That's otherwise lifeless? Wouldn't that shit take millennia to reach our galaxy?), so Kirk orders the Enterprise to fucking strafing run the entire planet and annihilate all the life on it in a planetwide genocide. "The Devil in the Dark" this ain't.
"Planet of No Return" is all right for a disposable pulp sci-fi adventure, and perhaps serves as a window to what Star Trek might have been like if not for Gene Roddenberry's higher ambitions. The Trek ethos of pacifism, understanding, and celebration of the diversity of life are no where to be found. Besides the wonky uniforms, off terminology (people "radio-TV message" the ship, "teleport" down to the planet, and fire "laser beam destruct rays"), emotional Spock, and weird depictions of the show's technology, it's this essential missing of the very point of Star Trek that comes off the most "wrong".
But it does get points for the imaginative sci-fi adventure elements. Divorced from Trek, it's a fun comic with good artwork. The story just isn't trying for anything other than a brainless "zap the monsters!" approach. Like the series as a whole, this first issue of the Gold Key comic is a weird look into a kind of "alternative" rendition of the series as a hokey pulp adventure.
Rating: 3 out of 4
Next Voyage: "Prisoners on the planet of the condemned sentence Captain Kirk to share their fate!" in The Devil's Isle of Space.
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