"Invasion of the City Builders"
Writer: Dick Wood
Artist: Alberto Giolitti
The third issue of Gold Key's irregularly published Star Trek comics came midway through season three -- but the photo collage cover for this issue still uses a pre-series publicity photo of Spock paired with a still from season one's "Charlie X". The issue itself takes another tentative step towards feeling more like Trek and less like a generic pulp space adventure, and also features the debut of a new series artist. Alberto Giolitti, like his predecessor, was an Italian artist with no knowledge of the show working solely off of publicity photos. His style is very similar to Zaccara's, with very good likenesses all around, but he's not quite as good. His rendition of the Enterprise in particular isn't as gorgeous, and famously features fiery exhaust trailing behind the warp nacelles (because it's a rocket ship, right?).
In this issue, the Enterprise is journeying to planet Alpha Z-21, which is believed to be highly advanced technologically but no contact has been made with before. And I don't recall how bad it was in previous issues, but Dick Wood goes overboard on bad sci-fi terminology in this issue. Y'know the kind -- that sort of pulp sensibility of referring to money as "space dollars" and so on. In this case, a crewman tells Kirk that the ship's ETA at the planet is "two lunar hours, one galaxy minute"! What the hell is a lunar hour? Is it a 24th of a lunar day? Because just say "two days" then, man! And what the heck is a galaxy minute? If we're on lunar time (why?), why would you switch measuring scales? That's like saying I'm five feet and 12.7 centimeters tall. Why??
There's a lot of that kind of dialogue in this comic. Real haphazard half-ass stuff. Anyways whenever they manage to arrive at the planet, the Enterprise does a flyby of the planet, fiery exhaust trails and all, at an extremely low altitude. Like it's buzzing the tops of buildings. Dramatic? Yes. How the ship works on the show? Nope.
Anyways a landing party of Kirk, Spock and two nobodies beams down (still referred to as "teleporting" in this comic), and we learn what this planet's deal is -- the society became super automated with machines doing everything to the point where the machines also built the machines and those machines built the cities. Until finally the machines built more city than there were people for and now there's just a tiny bit of natural planet left and a tiny amount of inhabitants and soon the city building machines will pave over that paradise and put up a parking lot too.
Kirk & Spock meet with a local leader named Krill and pledge to help destroy the machines, teach the people agriculture, help them rebuild the planet, etc. At first Krill is skeptical, he even tries to sabotage them at one point when he feels his authority is being usurped by these newcomers, but when Spock discovers a chemical weakness in the metal the machines are made of, Krill volunteers for the risky mission to destroy them and win back his people.The comic ends with a civilization saved, quite a stark contrast to the apocalyptic ending of the previous two issues.
This is the first issue of Gold Key's Star Trek to try and do one of the series classic "social problem as sci-fi story" tales, in this case a story about over building, destruction of natural resources, and overreliance on machines. It handles it very simplistically, but then this is a comic book for children, and the fact that it tried at all raises it above the level of the previous two issues.
My question continues to be why Trek comics were coming out seemingly just once or twice a year when the show was on, and why the creative team behind the comics was only so passingly aware of what the show was like, even this far in the television run.
Rating: 3 out of 4
Next Voyage: "An alien form invades the Enterprise through Spock's mind!" in The Peril of Planet Quick Change.
"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.
"The Planet of No Return"
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.
