Off Topic

This has nothing to do with Star Trek, but "Hi Trekkies" is a series of columns I write for Pink Raygun and I want to mention another article I wrote for them. Plus it's my blog, Trekkies, so suck it. The article's about latest issue of Batman, a wonderful story by Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Sandman) about Batman's surrealistic funeral. You can read my review at Pink Raygun now.

I'll be back to writing about Star Trek soon with (I hope) an interview of novelist and comic book writer Peter David. (I'm still waiting for him to get back to me with his answers.)

You Like Me 'Cause I'm a Scoundrel

Forgotten Treks: Haunted!

Hi Trekkies. In a recent spree in the dollar bins at New York Comic Con, I dug up some gems. I'm going to write a little series of reviews on this blog called "Forgotten Treks" where I'll review non-canon Trek stories, and I'm going to start with these comic books. As I mentioned in my last post, these stories are not always great but they're the foundation that this franchise was built on -- and the people who wrote them were mostly Trekkies like us!


Star Trek #4 (Marvel, vol. 1): “The Haunting of Thallus” (July 1980)
Star Trek #5 (Marvel, vol. 1): “The Haunting of the Enterprise” (Aug. 1980)
written by Marv Wolfman, illustrated by Dave Cockrum

After returning from making contact with V’ger (issues #1-3 were an adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and this is the first original story of the series), the Enterprise is assigned to escort a deranged escaped prisoner Raytrag M’gora back to a prison he escaped from on Thallus. Accompanying them is Ambassador R’kgg of Thallus. M'gora proves very dangerous when he escapes en route but is no match for Kirk and Spock. Arriving at Thallus the Enterprise receives a signal directing it to new coordinates. What Kirk assumes must be a penal space station turns out to be a haunted house adrift in space. Meanwhile the Enterprise is boarded by manifestations of ghosts and vampires, including a Dracula who murders Ambassador R'kgg.

Kirk leads a landing party to the haunted house and discovers an amnesiac blonde and a Klingons ambush. The Klingons lured the Enterprise with the new coordinates so they could capture it and learn the secret of its newly refitted engines. They kidnap Spock for his knowledge of the engines, intending to let their army of ghosts kill the crew and deliver them the ship unscathed. Returning to the Enterprise with the blonde, Kirk finds his ship overrun by deadly spectres. The Klingon captain reveals the Klingon plan to Spock: to capture the Enterprise without loss of Klingon life, they have hooked a captured human horror film archivist up to a thought projector, tempting him with the chance to make his dead wife live again, then taking control of his mind and forcing him to create the monsters, which are projected aboard the Enterprise through a brain implant in M'gora, a Klingon spy.

By mind melding with the archivist and manifesting as a ghost aboard the Enterprise, Spock instructs McCoy to kill the blonde, who is the image of the archivist’s wife. The psychic pain at her death overwhelms and kills M'gora and the images feed back—the monsters attack the Klingon ship, allowing Spock to escape with the thought projector and film archivist. Back on the Enterprise, McCoy teases Spock because his life was saved by human emotions.

REVIEW: When it comes to writing comics Marv Wolfman isn't exactly a lightweight -- he created Blade and Nightwing, wrote Crisis on Infinite Earths and had runs on most major series at one time or another. This story definitely isn't his best work, however. I can only assume that he was trying to mix Star Trek with the horror comics that were so popular in the late '70s. Unfortunately he's also invoking the classic Trek episode "Catspaw," which wasn't the original series' greatest moment! The highlight of reading these issues was probably an ad in issue #5 where the Hulk fights a group of rampaging disco skaters. In an interesting trivia moment, the Klingon captain refers to his government as the High Council, anticipating the terminology of Star Trek: The Next Generation by ten years.

GRADE: B-

Canon vs. Non-Canon

Hi Trekkies! For some reason we Trekkies spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what is "canon" and what isn't. T

Recently, a very wise Trekkie pointed out that only Star Trek fans seem to care about this type of thing. He pointed out that Batman, for example, has many different inconsistent versions. There's a separate continuity for the Golden Age, Silver Age, modern age, the Adam West series, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, the Tim Burton Movies, Batman Forever/Batman & Robin, the Christopher Nolan movies and The Dark Knight Returns. Batman don't care and never get confused. Why are Star Trek fans up in arms when Enterprise is inconsistent with TOS or when the new Star Trek movie ignores the TV continuity? I don't know but we are.

I'm going to go a step farther and say that we Trekkies should care even less than Batman fans about continuity. A lot of us grew up with multiple Star Trek series creating official canon stories every week but we should remember what came before that. There were 79 episodes of the classic TV series. That's a pretty bare skeleton to build a franchise on. For eighteen years, 1969-1987, there was no canon Trek except four movies.

This was the era when the Star Trek Universe was really created. It was built on the bare bones of the old series, and it wasn't built by clever TV writers -- it was created by Trekkies like us in the competing continuities of Gold Key, Marvel and DC Comics, animation, fanzines, Best of Trek anthologies, Saturday morning animation. At times these "Forgotten Treks" were bad, at times they were inspiringly done. But the important thing is that, more than any other series, Star Trek's universe was explored and shaped by fans rather than professionals. Maybe that's why it's done so well.

So, Trekkies, don't be a canon Nazi. Try to enjoy the Star Trek Universe in all its glory.