Villordsutch reviews Star Trek #34….
“Lost Apollo” concludes here! Stranded on an alien world and cut off from the Enterprise, Spock and Bones must work together to save Captain Kirk from a fate worse than death… a fate tied to the earliest days of humanity’s journey to the stars! Overseen by Star Trek writer/producer Roberto Orci, this all-new adventure continues the five-year mission between the new movies!
Those who recall my review of Lost Apollo Part 1 by Mike Johnson will remember that I was rather nonplussed by the whole issue. I was not only left frustrated at the poor writing Mike Johnson was giving us after his rather excellent turn-in of “I, Enterprise”, but the artwork from Joe Corroney was amazingly poor too, with characters seemingly being made from Play-Doh and facial features appearing occasionally askew; the whole issue was upsetting.
One of the biggest bugbears was the little attempt the last issue made of actually giving us any story about the said “Lost Apollo”, other than a few panels. Well here in issue two they fix that and give us a whole lot of story directed at the title, but the problem is that it’s a rather poor tale which is now being crammed into a single comic. You’ll be scratching your head at the bizarre jigsaw pieces that Mike Johnson has tried to bash together to form some sort of story; it’s the sort of story you’ll read and will say out loud, at some point, “What?”
I’ll quickly give a quick overview. Our astronaut from the past arrived on this Alien Planet via a NASA-made experimental nuclear rocket, launched in 1972 from the dark side of the moon just so the Russians wouldn’t find out. He landed on this alien world nd due to this planet’s odd environment it rapidly altered his DNA so he became the slobbering purple beast – though we don’t know this except for a hair containing human DNA on Kirk’s suit, and Kirk’s hunch. It’s thanks this hunch we discover the story of the rocket, though again how Kirk gets to that hunch is really not given to us.
As with last issue the art from Joe Corroney isn’t really acceptable at all. Faces appear to be melting and there is no consistency with characters from one panel to another; it’s really not good. The artwork and the poor story combined give us a really bad comic here. “Lost Apollo” has been a story that should just be titled “Lost” or perhaps even, “Binned!” Mike Johnson, no more of these please.
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 June 11, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
