Star Trek: Countdown (2009)

Star Trek: Countdown (2009)

Authors: Mike Johnson / Tim Jones | Illustrator: David Messina | Page Count: 98

"It's worse than we thought."

A prequel comic to the 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise. I consider such tie-ins to be mostly easy milk from the cash-cow, but ST:C is mostly water.

Set post-Nemesis (2002) it attempts to link The Next Generation cast with events from the film, acting as yet another passing of the torch, but it's ham-fisted. In most cases cameos from TNG's crew exist for no reason other than to have cameos from TNG crew.

Their actions and dialogue aren't properly tailored to fit how their TV show counterparts would act or speak in the same situation; change the facial likeness and it'd be difficult to guess who it's meant to be. Speaking of which, the artwork is generally good, with characters looking like the actors they represent, and both light and shadow are handled well by the colourist(s).

Pictures of the new film's crew are slotted between each chapter. I don't know why that is, they've neither place nor part in the story; except for Captain James T. Kirk, once, and he looks like William Shatner, not the new guy. If you want to know who does feature in the book, take a look at the cover art pictured above (or below for the four individual covers).

Naturally, the comic will have limited appeal to non-Trek fans, but I feel that discerning long-time Trek fans will have almost no interest in the contrived plot and uncharacteristic actions and dialogues of the cast. If that's so, then it raises the questions of who the target audience really is and why the publishers even bothered to produce it in the first place?

I think both questions have the same answer, which is that it exists to exploit fans (existing and new). The people that recognise the cow for what it is but can tolerate a glass of watered-down milk with their TV snacks should maybe seek it out from a library, because it's a read-once-only kind of book. Giving it permanent space on a book shelf would be an insult to the shelf.

The book collects together Star Trek: Countdown issues 1-4.

Individual covers. Click for FULL size: