Villordsutch reviews Star Trek – New Visions #1: The Mirror, Cracked…
New Visions begins by going through the looking glass to tell the story of what happened after the classic “Mirror, Mirror” episode of the original series. In issue #1, “The Mirror, Cracked,” the crew of the Starship: Enterprise discovers two strangers in their midst, and things take a turn when they learn that one of them has made a pact with one of James Kirk’s oldest foes.
It could be easy to be glib about this bi-monthly Trek release and “Pfft!” at it whilst decrying, “someone (in this case John Byrne) has just Photoshopped stills from Original Trek and made a comic out of it!?” I can honestly say that my rather shallow outlook concerning the first few pages was the above, but then my feeling of being cheated turned to confusion, then later enjoyment, back to confusion and finally I honestly couldn’t wait for the end to come.
Possibly not the greatest opener to a review, with no suspense as to how I felt here, but this isn’t the greatest of Star Trek comics. What guiles me the most though is that part way through this comic book (if I can call it that) I felt like I was enjoying it! However on a more observational view of myself, it was more an appreciation of the photo-manipulation (in this case it’s called Photomontage) of the actors in the stills rather than anything to do with the actual story itself; even then there are people, with amazing talents, out there manipulating photographs daily across the 9GAG meme world and I’m not shelling out $8 for looking at that.
The story follows on from the original episode “Mirror, Mirror” by Jerome Bixby; in this tale Evil Kirk beams on board the U.S.S. Enterprise and brings with him the means to bring a fiery end to Good Kirk and Co. for the trouble they brought upon him once they had left his Universe, corrupting Goatee Spock with good logic instead of bad logic which cascaded into a whole heap of bother for Evil Kirk. Along the road within this fifty something page issue, we have Klingons including Commander Kor with a Romulan Cloaking Device (brought over by Evil Kirk) and a loophole in the Organian Peace Treaty and Captain Uhura. This all may sound like a big bag of fun to Star Trek fans, but I was left far from that feeling as I wondered where Kirk had stashed the Romulan Cloaking Device when he beamed over, or in the beginning actually wondering who was who, and was thankful when John Byrne gave Spock his beard back and Kirk his “Evil” uniform back; the Organian loophole was more of a “try to pretend it doesn’t exist somehow”, except when Kor had the chance to do a kill of his own.
One thing I do have to say in favour of this though is a lot of work has to have gone into it, and for that I cannot take anything away; it’s such a shame that a reliance of gimmick of a photo-story to generate sales has been used. Perhaps for the next issue they could get somebody in from the stables of new Trek or a respected original Trek scribe to generate a story then get John to do his photomontage on top of that. Give this substance to rely on instead of hoping for people to be caught in the style trap. Perhaps in two months we’ll see a change. My fingers are crossed.
View our preview of Star Trek – New Visions #1: The Mirror, Cracked here.
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
Originally published May 14, 2014. Updated January 18, 2020.
