"Star Trek" Gold Key Comics Review: Issue #2 (March, 1968)

"The Devil's Isle of Space"
Writer: Dick Wood
Artist: Nevio Zaccara

I don't really know what publishing schedule Gold Key was on in 1968, but it's been eight months since their previous Star Trek release. Given that the TV series was on the constant brink of cancellation, I suppose it makes sense that the comic book publisher would be wary of devoting to many resources to a licensed comic. So this issue comes near the end of season 2, and while you'd think they might mean the creative team would have a better handle on the tone of the show, well, you'd only be half right. 

Nevio Zaccara's art continues to be gorgeous, just as much as it continues to be obvious he's working off publicity photos with no knowledge of the show. Primarily, the tricorder is consistently depicted as being a communicator, but also there's the one panel appearance of Uhura coloured as a white woman -- something that could just as easily be the team working off b&w photos as it could be a colouring error due to Gold Key's cheapness as it could also be an instance of actual whitewashing. Given that Uhura is also depicted wearing the wrong uniform colour, I am inclined to believe the error is due to working from b&w photos.

Dick Wood has a slightly better handle on the characters and their attitudes this time. Maybe he'd actually seen some episodes by this point? Better is a relative term though. Kirk goes on the landing party accompanied entirely by redshirts -- all of them heroic manly men -- while Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura are aboard ship, giving us a repeat of "Kirk does things, Spock supports" from the first issue. Which means this issue fails to tap into the most significant thing that had connected Star Trek to its fans -- not sci-fi sights and sounds but rather the relationships between the characters, primarily Kirk and Spock. Instead, Wood splits Kirk away from the others so he can be aggressively heroic, while the rest of the show's cast remain talking heads (although we do get McCoy in the command colours again, and a Scotty who looks completely different since Zaccara had no publicity photos of James Doohan to go off of!)

Anyways, the story for this issue is that once again we're way outside the Milky Way ("the outer fringe of Galaxy Nabu"!) investigating an asteroid field, when the ship is pulled in by an "electronic field" that traps the Enterprise in orbit around one of the larger planetoids. So Kirk and his boys go down to find out WTF is going on, and discover it's a prison world. This alien race shoots ships full of convicts to the various asteroids, all of which are set to detonate at any time. Thus, depending on which asteroid your ship lands on, you may have longer or shorter to live, at random. It seems like a really expensive way of carrying out a death penalty, bringing to mind Spock's line from "Space Seed" -- "a group of criminals could have been dealt with far more efficiently than wasting one of their most advanced spaceships."

Anyway, predictably there's a thuggish leader who controls a large faction of the population and wants Kirk to take them aboard so they can capture the Enterprise and escape before their world explodes. There are of course many lies, traps, counter-traps, and turns of fortune as Spock seeks to find a way through the "electric field" that holds the ship there, and beam the Captain's party up without getting the convicts too (apparently the comic book Enterprise's transporter is always set on "wide beam"). 

So Spock finally figures out he can send a second landing party led by "Scotty" to distract the criminals so he can get them far enough away to beam up Kirk's party and then once everyone is aboard the Enterprise breaks free of the field and the asteroid explodes, killing all the convicts on it. 

Like issue #1, this is essentially a basic barebones action-adventure "sci-fi" story, with Star Trek dressing on it. Unlike that first issue, it's not far enough away from what might have been done on the show to provide much novelty value, and it's not batshit crazy enough to have the fuck WTF appeal either. Like the previous issue, we have no hints of the series' higher ambitions or ideals, and instead a basic Saturday morning cartoon plot -- when really by this point we should be able to get something a bit better. Nevio Zaccara's art is the best element of this comic by far.

Rating: 2 out of 4

Next Voyage: "Automated destroyers! Minutes to save a dying planet!" in Invasion of the City Builders.