Villordsutch reviews Star Trek #33…
After the events of ‘Star Trek Into Darkness‘, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise have embarked on their Five Year Mission into uncharted space… only to encounter a deadly new alien species unlike anything the Federation has met before! Don’t miss this all-new adventure overseen by STAR TREK writer/producer Roberto Orci!
I’m unsure exactly what goes on in the office of Mike Johnson, not being privy to the inner workings of an IDW writer’s contractual obligations when it comes to issuing stories. I really don’t know if they have to actually produce something some painfully poor against something which has been classed as rather good or entertaining. As some of you may know “I, Enterprise”, though compact, was rather good, but suffered from not having breathing room. Here however, we have a different problem.
I could single out (if I wanted to be vicious) the artwork by Joe Corroney and the fact that for each panel the characters barely hold any form as if they are made from Play-Doh, Spock’s fluctuating weight problem that or the crew’s facial features lurching to one side of the face or stretching across in a disconcerting way; you’re lucky if you can guess the difference between Sulu and Kirk on the Away Team. The colouring seems to also be a bit bizarre – from the odd use of shading to the rather flat use of one tone, it feels extremely wrong.
Though the artwork isn’t my only problem within these pages; it’s the story as a whole that left me feel the most frustrated. You’ll get to the end of this issue and feel there really wasn’t anything in this comic that you’ve paid good money for. If anything you’ll feel like you’ve been treated as a bit of a buffoon, expected to put aside the recent Trek lore for the sake of poor story-writing. We’ve got the Apollo story yes, but truthfully this only covers a small number of these panels and it appears this will be explored more in Part 2. What we have instead is an Away Team bundling around on an alien planet with Sulu, who Section 31 was only recently attempting to poach, chasing a monkey-like creature that has stolen his tricorder, whilst ignoring his Captain’s orders to stop. If I wasn’t reading this on my Nexus 7 I think I may have flung it across the floor at the Sulu chase moment.
This issue isn’t an comic I’d be running out to buy if I had a choice of titles and that’s a shame as the previous two Star Trek issues have been rather good; I’m even more convinced now that they should have been allowed to print “I, Enterprise” over three issues and skipped this story altogether. Look for another IDW comic on the shelf this week – there are some other stormingly good ones available.
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 28, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
