The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1148: Star Trek #6, July 1984

One last little bit of Star Trek, but I think we'll be back soon.

Though today's cover makes it look like the duplicated Kirk will be the main thrust of the issue, it's little more than an inconvenient circumstance that occurs late in the comic. Where other stories might make the shape-shifting assassin the primary focus of the story, it's really the reasons for the assassination attempt that are the salient aspect. The politics of the story is the important part. Further, the familial relationship between the assassin and target reveals a far less utopian society that the television series (well, TOS and TNG, at least) show us. There are those within the Federation who disagree with that body's policies and actions. It seems to me that the utopian aspect perhaps tends to the more basic needs, the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy, whereas the higher levels, dealing with morality and governance, are still very much areas of debate. As they are in our own time. In the way, the Star Trek comic is doing what TV Trek, and any good science fiction, does very well: turns a mirror upon us and asks what we see.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1147: Star Trek #5, June 1984

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...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1146: Star Trek #4, May 1984

Our story concludes, with the Excalbians facing off against the Organians. There's something interesting being said in this comic about the nature of Good and Evil. The Excalbians simply do not see their role as Evil, and Kirk plays on this in his solution to the problem of the story. It's true that the bad guys never think they're the bad guys. Well, hardly ever.

Reading these comics is like half-remembering a dream. I've read them before, numerous times, but it really has been so long that when I read a story, some details come back, but not all of them.

A couple more issues of this series, a taste of where Barr, Sutton, and company are going to take us, then we'll boldly go somewhere else in the collection.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1145: Star Trek #3, April 1984

Though TNG claimed that Worf was amongst the first, if not the first, Klingon to serve aboard a Federation vessel, there is also the case of Konom. Where the action of this storyline is the usual Federation versus Klingons, the threat of war, etc., the story of Konom actually gives us some emotional depth. Yesterday's comic was titled "..the Only Good Klingon," of course trading on the usual completion of that phrase "...is a dead one." However, what the title actually refers to is a Klingon who cannot stomach the killing and bloodshed that define his civilization. It is Konom who gives the Enterprise the first clue as to the Klingons' new tech, and he assists Kirk and Bryce in escaping the space station. Konom remains an important character throughout this series, and there's some excellent stories dealing with the prejudicial treatment he receives. His first friend is Ensign Bryce, whose father was killed by the very regiment to which Konom was assigned. Their relationship is a nice way of looking the reparation of long-burned bridges.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1144: Star Trek #2, March 1984

The tag line at the top is a little disingenuous. Yes, Kirk's there, but so are Saavik and the newly-introduced Ensign Bryce, who, along with her other new recruit cohort, is amongst the reasons I love this series so much. The opening of the first issue shows the death of two characters named Bearclaw and Bryce aboard the ship that the Enterprise is investigating. Similarly, as the Enterprise leaves Earth, two new recruits bearing the same names are aboard. The drama that unfolds between these two ensigns is excellent, and gives us a perspective on a few things that we don't often see in Star Trek. First, there's some generational trauma going on here, as Ensign Bearclaw blames father's death on Bryce's father. Bryce, on the other hand, claims her father did his job, and couldn't have done anything more. Add to this the fact that Bearclaw is an Indigenous person, and you've got some interesting commentary, both on recent and historical traumas. I'm curious to see how Barr and co. handle Bearclaw's portrayal. The second interesting thing these characters do for us is show us what life is actually like aboard the Enterprise. They're bored a lot of the time, or just fed up with one another - there might be a lot of people on board, but a small population is a small population. There was a Star Trek: TNG episode ("Lower Decks"?) that attempted something similar to this, but the advantage of the serialized comic medium is that a story is often going to be more drawn out that on television, leaving more space for the development of ancillary characters.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1143: Star Trek #1, February 1984

The edge of my copy of this comic, just over by where Uhura is on the cover, is quite damaged, torn and split and worn. That's because I've read and re-read this series many times over the last 34 years. My copy of this comic was first purchased by my Mum, who collected comics right along side me for quite some time. It was she who picked this one up, and the first issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the first issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. She wasn't a fan of Miller's take on the Dark Knight.

But she did like this series, and collected all 56 issues, along with the film tie-ins and annuals. And then she gave them to me. Which I'm totally fine with, because I really, truly love this series. Mike Barr and company perfectly translate what's great about Star Trek to a different medium. They work within the boundaries of the films that were coming out at the time, but tell remarkable stories that capture the action and the thought of the original series, while also embracing the serial nature of the medium.

I'm going to have many things to say about this run, I'm sure. But for today, let me just say I'm really excited to be delving back into it. It's been ages since I've read it.

And it makes me think of my Mum.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1031: Adventures of the Outsiders #43, March 1987

I wonder if Charles Dickens knew what he was handing to the world when he composed A Christmas Carol? The story is told and retold so many times, and always, always works. Is it just that we can all relate too much to the closed off person who is reminded of his links to humanity? Grim thought for this time of year, I guess.

This was a strange comic - I'm not sure if what the Outsiders do here is at all ethical - they basically gaslight an old man into confessing secrets he knows about a mobster. It's less physically violent than an old-fashioned superheroic brawl, but it's also less honest. The team is not, as far as I could tell, doing this to help redeem a man who has spent much of his life covering up crimes but rather to arrest the crime boss he works for. The accountant who serves as the Scrooge stand-in here is incidental in many ways. They get the information they want from him, and then are surprised that, having experienced "3 spirits," the old man confesses his crimes to the police and turns himself in. It's as if the notion of the man redeeming himself never even crossed their minds. All but Halo, who says she feels bad tricking the man this way.

All in all, a strange Christmas story. It calls back to its original for sure, but doesn't quite grasp the same spirit of fellowship that Dickens was, ostensibly, looking for.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 665: The Outsiders #5, March 1986

Another Dickens-style Christmas tale. The more I think about it, the more I'm a little troubled by the idea of using fear as a means of changing someone. It's a form of torture, really, isn't it? In today's comic, Halo recognizes this as she witnesses Eben Mudge, aged accountant, collapse sobbing to his knees when his past is replayed for him. It is fair to be utilizing moments of shame from the man's past to squeeze information from him? It's not even that the Outsiders are trying to save the man, or offer him some kind of redemption. They're simply interested in getting information from him in order to shut down a mob boss. Though the eventual outcome is a changed man, that's certainly not what the Outsiders expected going in.

An odd story, then, about Christmas torture that ends up redeeming someone, but perhaps casting our ostensible heroes in a pretty bad light.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 623: The Brave and The Bold #192, November 1982

A lovely little tale of Batman's mentoring of Superman, a pre-Crisis tale in which young Clark and Bruce know each other, and so Bruce has no qualms, no hesitation in removing his cowl and revealing himself to a time-displaced Superboy.

I miss this version of Batman, prior to the Millerian reinvention, a man who, though grim, though darker than his fellows, still betrays some optimism, some trust, who is not the paranoid figure that Batman becomes in the decades following this story.

It's a weird morning, this morning. I went downstairs to pick out a comic, and I knew I needed to read something with Superman in it. There's this wrestling I do when I'm feeling betrayed by the world, when I'm shocked by the events that transpire, by the triumph of hatred. I'm a queer man, yes, but I'm also a middle-aged white man, and that puts me, unfairly, in a privileged position. And whenever I rail about unfairness in the world, it comes from that position of privilege. I have to be aware of that whenever I express the kind of shock and disgust I feel this morning, looking south. That there are people for whom this kind of shock and disgust is a fact of daily life. That there are people who live in fear of their lives every day in a way that I will likely never understand. So I wrestle with my place in the conversation. The best I can do is to be not just an ally, but a comrade. To echo the words of Superman in All-Star, that you are stronger than you think, all of you. And, together, I still firmly believe that we can make the world better for everyone.

Today, more than usual, onward. Ever onward.