By Matthew C. Brown. Our Week In Review sums up our weekly comic book coverage while taking time for a new review or two before it’s all over. Did we miss your favorite books this week? Well. This is where you need to be.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Mirror Broken #1
IDW Publishing/$3.99
Written by David Tipton & Scott Tipton.
Art & Colors by J.K. Woodward.
Letters by AndWorld Design.
MCB: We all know the classic Star Trek opening lines. “Space… The final frontier. These are the voyages of the I.S.S. Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to conquer strange new worlds, to enslave new life and new civilizations… To boldly go where no one has gone before!” Wait, what? There’s something off here.
Why does Spock have a goatee? Where are Jean-Luc Picard’s sleeves? Uh-oh. This is not the peaceful, knowledge-seeking Federation to which we’ve long aspired. This is the darkest timeline, a black mirror dimension where profit and conquest trump peace and exploration.
David and Scott Tipton have taken this concept from the Original Series’ (TOS) Season 2 episode, “Mirror, Mirror” — in which a transporter accident lands Captain Kirk in an alternate imperial universe — and projected that universe onto The Next Generation (TNG).
Though Star Trek can be pretty on the nose with alternative aesthetics and character relationships, it may be potentially fascinating to see a Trek story set completely from the perspective of the doppelgangers found in this alternate universe. Only time will tell if something truly fresh comes out of this concept.
This book looks and reads exactly like any TV episode of TOS or TNG, which means the team behind it is doing exactly what is required of them to properly fit into this world’s mold, but Star Trek at its core is about moving forward and not being held back by form or content. Something feels inherently threadbare about this conceptual approach.
With our first look at the new Star Trek series, Discovery, coming to CBS All Access later this year, and seeing this show dwell in the period before Kirk and Spock (and therefore also going backwards chronologically), I have to wonder if we will ever get another vision of Star Trek that does what fans believe it can do, and what the show proclaims as its mission: To boldly go where no one has gone before.
5 out of 10
From earlier this week —
The Superman Revenge Squad returns to ‘Action Comics’ in earnest
Preview: Grab your orange soda and rejoice, for ‘4 Kids Walk Into a Bank’ returns
Archie Comics narrows down their kill list for “Over the Edge”, which is only polite
Exclusive Preview: Pitarra’s cover to ‘TMNT: Dimension X’ #3 is pure, undiluted eye candy
‘Generation X’ one of ten new or rebooted X-books (which is six or seven too many)
What books did YOU read this week? We want to know! Tell us about those feelings of yours in the comments section below.
