Villordsutch reviews Star Trek: New Visions #2 – Time’s Echo…
In “Core,” from the raging heart of the galaxy comes a message that summons the crew of the Starship: Enterprise on their most bizarre and dangerous mission. A message sent by their own captain… ten centuries earlier!”
It really doesn’t seem like two months since the last photonovel from John Byrne, but in looking back to my last review for The Mirror, Cracked it’s been close to three months since the last one. For those of you that didn’t read my review of The Mirror, Cracked, in a very brief nutshell a lot of work clearly had gone into producing this comic however I found the story somewhat lacking. At the beginning of the week Flickering Myth gave a preview of this issue’s first few pages here and I’ll return to the look of the comic shortly but I’ll discuss the stories first.
The stories – (plural) as we have two – are cracking Trek tales involving a mysterious message from Galactic Core and a very brief goodbye tale to Yeoman Rand. In the first story a Federation listening outpost receives a thousand year old message from Captain James T. Kirk close to the Galactic Central Core with instructions on how to get to a certain unknown, unmapped planet. The Enterprise is sent to investigate and when they arrive they discover a destroyed Enterprise, pieces of it strewn across the planet’s surface and buildings built across its hull, which have been there for centuries. It’s an excellent Trek story which stays within the realms of Original Trek too, and then a goodbye to Rand tale and a silent send off from Kirk is the proverbial cherry to the Trek-like cake.
The photonovel on a whole again is good and it’s clear from this issue that John Byrne has put a lot of work into making this look as near-flawless as he can. However and this really is a big “HOWEVER”, there is something that ruins the look of this photonovel and could possible stop people going further than page one. The character called Commander Resnick – I could only attribute the look of him to John Byrne handling the entire comic but giving the job of Resnick to the temp who is covering for an hour. I could even let the shaded pink woman go, but with Resnick I’ve no idea what went wrong there; he only appears for about five pages but the memory of him lingers for so much longer.
Issue #2 of New Visions is far better than the initial opener, the two stories are brilliant Trek tales and if it wasn’t for the poor appearance from Resnick I would have been smiling all the way as the rest of the comic looks rather grand. If you can ignore Resnick (perhaps the use of a well-placed thumb) you’re on to a winner 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 August 7, 2014. Updated January 18, 2020.
