One of the things that Jim Kirk is known for, within and without the fictional universe, is breaking (or bending, as he would say) the Prime Directive. This tenet of non-interference drives the exploratory wing of Starfleet, but what Kirk's experiences nicely demonstrate for us is that no rule can be absolute. There's always going to be a time when disregarding, or creatively interpreting, a rule is necessary.
Kirk excels at this. Not so much the man up there on the cover who, at no time, does anything remotely like what he's doing there.
I don't remember how much of the series deals with these kind of surreptitious incursions onto less-developed worlds, but it will be interesting to see how the colonial aspect of Starfleet is parsed through these encounters.
A further aspect of this is that in today's issue, Ensign Bearclaw is said to have had a "traditional Indian upbringing," a term that just seems highly inappropriate to the ostensibly utopian universe of the Federation. There's no real acknowledgment of how Bearclaw might react, given his traditional upbringing, to the work of Starfleet and the Federation. And I think the real problem here is not so much the depiction of Bearclaw as a tracker - that's something that is rather believable of someone of his background. But there's a lack of any other representation, the Indigenous person who isn't a tracker. I was talking to my students about representation and the danger of stereotyping today. Hopefully Mike Barr will be able to steer away from stereotyping.
It's very "thinky," this Star Trek comic.
More to come...
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