Villordsutch reviews Star Trek #30…
“Captain Jane Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise fight fortheir lives in this concluding chapter of a 2-part story overseen by STAR TREK writer/producer Roberto Orci! The Five Year Mission between blockbuster movies continues here, in this all-new mind-bending adventure!”
Some of you may remember that I wasn’t overly impressed by Mike Johnson’s attempt at a Star Trek comic last month, with his pointless, empty tale of a ‘verse where everything has occurred exactly the same except the gender roles were reversed, so instead of James Kirk for example, we got Jane Kirk, or instead of Khan we got erm… Khan (albeit told that he was a she); it frustrated me and came across as rather pathetic and, in my mind, a little demeaning to the Trek fan.
With all of the above in mind, I wasn’t overly keen on taking up issue 30; I was, to be brutally honest, considering jumping straight to issue 31 and hoping the next tale would wash this bitter taste from my tongue. Attempting to push the negative thoughts from my squishy grey place and to give a more honest review so not tainted by last month I began reading and initially I was rather interested.
Both crews of the Enterprise begin to talk and are taken back by what they are witnessing. Eventually the boys agree to go across to the girls’ vessel to share data and try and work out what has happened. I know they could do so from ship to ship via computers, but that wouldn’t be Trek and I’ll be honest here this was good; I especially enjoyed the fact that although James is known for being a bit of a ladies man, when it came to authority it was Jane Kirk that was more vocal with orders and what she would like the two crews to achieve. Only after did she apologise to James if she over-stepped the mark towards his crew. It was interesting, but after this it all takes an amazingly messy turn for the worse.
It’s quite clear that Mike Johnson had no idea what he was going to do with this XX Chromosome Crew of the Enterprise as at the end he throws oddities and hopeful fan pleasing images to distract us from the empty vacuum of a story he’s attempting to get past us. From what started out as perhaps a Q messing around moment (sheets changing colour, different gender roles, same time-line etc), we ended up with a lot of nothing being sold to us. Perhaps Mike is running low on Trek ideas and could do with passing the baton on to another writer.
In the art department Yasmin Liang’s work is okay. It’s not amazing and occasionally the characters lose a bit of shape, but it’s nothing tragic; the cover art however is fantastic and again I’d love to see more of this used through-out the Star Trek comic universe.
For me, both Issue 29 and now issue 30 have been awful! In years to come when you show your comic collection to your children and grandchildren be kind and skip these two issues as you need to remember they’ll be deciding which nursing home you end up in.
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 February 26, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
