Rich Handley

‘Star Trek: The Newspaper Comics. The Complete Comics Volume Two: 1981-83’ collects the daily original series ‘Star Trek’ newspaper strips from 1981-83. The title is accurate.

After an interesting general introduction by J.C. Vaughn, we have the strips. ‘Restructuring Is Futile’ is written by Sharman Di Vono and drawn by Ron Harris. A machine intelligence called the Omnimind has turned a Klingon crew into cyborgs to serve it. Much is made in the introduction of how this prefigures the Borg so the given title is a pointer to that. The titles are a way of grouping the stories for this edition. The original strips didn’t have them. The story is okay. It is in the nature of daily strips that the first panel recaps a bit, leaving only two more to progress the tale. This is challenging for the writer and makes for an unavoidably choppy narrative which is disconcerting at first but one gets accustomed to it. That’s not to say one gets to like it. The art isn’t great but it does tell the tale well enough. I understand there is a lot of deadline pressure with a daily strip so an artist can’t always turn out his best work.

The second story is ‘The Wristwatch Plantation‘. The Enterprise has to escort some Bebebeque to one of their colony worlds with which they have lost contact to find out what’s happened there. The Bebebeque are clever insectoid aliens about the size of small dogs and renowned for their skill at miniaturisation. They are very important trading partners for the Federation, so Kirk must do nothing to upset them but they drive his crew crazy whizzing around on their little anti-gravity sleds. Larry Niven had a hand in the story and it features the Kzinti. They’re a race of war-loving meat-eaters invented by Niven for his own ‘Known Space’ stories who also appeared in the ‘Star Trek’ animated series. All in all, this was a pretty good yarn and true to the spirit of the original series. The art of Ron Harris seems a bit better here so perhaps he was getting used to the format.

DiVono and Harris also did ‘The Nogura Regatta’ in which several Federation ships compete in a friendly manner but pirates intervene. It was okay. Padraic Shigetani took over both writing and art for a long story entitled ‘A Merchants Loyalty’. Unscrupulous business persons try to lure the Enterprise into a trap. One day someone should do a thesis on why business people are nearly always villains in the work of most creative writers. The story wasn’t great and the art relied too much on headshots but at least it seems to have been done by a grown man.

‘Send In The Clones’ is scripted by Gerry Conway and the art is by Bob Myers who draws like a ten-year-old. The strange stumpy figures look odd but he has a knack for faces sometimes. The contrast when you get to Ernie Colón’s drawing on the next strip is quite startling as Ernie does excellent pen and ink work. So does Alfredo Alcala who takes over half-way through on ‘Goodbye To Spock’, where the Vulcan loses his memory and falls in love with a beautiful Princess. Hey-ho! The book winds down with a few shorter tales from Conway with quite decent art by Kulpa for which he should be glad to take the blame. The short stories actually seemed better suited to this format than the long drawn out ‘epics’.

Collecting these rarities is a worthy publishing exercise and I’m glad someone is doing it. As with many ‘classic’ works, it has to be taken in the context of its time and of the limitations of the genre. Writers and artists work under certain constraints with a franchise and these are added to by the straightjacket of a daily three-panel strip. I take it for granted that they did the best work they could in the circumstances, even Bob Myers. I’m sure this will be snapped up by those thousands who will buy anything with ‘Trek’ in the title. The more general reader will also find it interesting but don‘t expect to be awed. The price reflects the excellent quality of the production in this book. Hardcovers and good quality paper don’t come cheap nowadays.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/… (mais)

Previously, Rich Handley published Timeline of the Planet of the Apes, one of the more admirably thorough timelines I've ever seen, and he's done it again with From Aldo to Zira (heh), an incredibly comprehensive encyclopedia of all Apes lore. It's all here: every name, every place, every number from Pierre Boulle's novel, from the original film series, from the TV series, from the cartoon, from the many comics, from the Tim Burton remake, from the videogame, from the stage shows, from the unproduced scripts! It's nuts! I've now forgotten more than most people will ever know about Planet of the Apes, I expect.

My main discovery is that timelines make for better reading than encyclopedias: in a timeline, there's a puzzle being solved, but that's not the case here. Just facts, facts, FACTS! I appreciated the little continuity symbols Handley included at the beginning of each entry: it made it easy for me to skip entries about the Burton film (and its spin-offs), unproduced remakes, and the videogames, none of which I had any interest in. On the other hand, I would really like to read many of the older Planet of the Apes comics now, though they don't seem to be readily available. I am looking forward to reading Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, too.

My only gripe with this book is that information from unpublished sources is often integrated into entries. While it's interesting to read about, does it really make sense to include information gleaned from Tarzan on the Planet of the Apes in the entry on, say, "time travel" if no one ever even approved the outline? What authority does that information have? I like knowing it, but it should have been more clearly indicated as coming from unpublished sources.… (mais)

This book is incredibly well-researched, and it is far more into Planet of the Apes than I'll ever be. I had no idea how much stuff was out there! But the fact that I lost patience with the book sometimes is a positive; I might not be interested in an episode-by-episode breakdown of the 1975 cartoon Return to the Planet of the Apes, but I'm sure that a real PotA fan would be. This book takes in everything, from the original five films to the comics to Burton reboot to promotional newspapers handed out in the 1970s to unpublished works and even the original novel!

Handley, like any good timeliner, shows his work, though I don't know enough about PotA to dispute it, and he even offers alternative suggestions from competing timelines. The only complaint I have with his methodology he says in the introduction that he plans on being all-inclusive, without regard to contradictions: "the purpose behind this timeline [is] to set every event in its wherever is respective story places it, leaving fans to accept or discount specific tales or aspects of the franchise as they please" (xiii). Thus, the Burton film can appear in the same timeline as the original film. So far, so good. But he doesn't actually do this: some stories have their dates shuffled around to make them fit with other stories, and particularly annoying are the notes peppered through the sections based on the new film, like "The U. S. Air Force continues to function, though its members remain unaware of the ape rebellion and nuclear war that devastated the planet" (67). They're unaware of it because it didn't happen! Handley can act like everything is consistent if he wants... but why claim to do one while actually doing another? It's weird.

I must say, though, that parts of the book make engrossing reading in their own right, especially the late-20th-century material dealing with the ape rebellion. Plus, it taught me that Marvel UK adapted the Killraven comics to be part of the PotA universe! I need to get hold of those now...… (mais)