We still don’t know exactly when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will debut. But until it does, we can revisit a previous Star Trek series—a comic book series—that also chronicled Christopher Pike’s command of the U.S.S. Enterprise: Star Trek Early Voyages.
During Marvel Comics’ brief, second go-round as the Star Trek comics license holder, British comic book writers and frequent collaborators Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton started filling in the story gap between the first and second pilot episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series.
For 17 fast-paced, entertaining, and innovative issues between February 1997 and June 1998, Edginton and Abnett, with a team of talented graphic artists, immersed Star Trek fans in a whole new “old” era of the Enterprise.
Giving Captain Pike a diverse, dynamic crew
From issue #1, it’s clear Abnett and Edginton know and love their source material. Although some nits can be picked—and readers who wrote into the letters page picked them—the writers brought the Christopher Pike era to life seemingly effortlessly.
Most of the crew we met in “The Cage” are here: Captain Pike, Number One, a young Spock, Dr. Boyce (as letter writers noted, he looks less like John Hoyt and more like Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards due to likeness legalities), and helmsman Joe Tyler. Yeoman Colt transfers aboard following the death of Pike’s previous yeoman on Rigel VII, a tale revealed in full in issue #3.
The book’s creative team also introduced some welcome diversity into Pike’s crew, just as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds appears set to do.
We meet two new women, navigator Sita Mohindas and head nurse Gabrielle Carlotti. We find Moves-With-Burning-Grace, a man of Maasai descent, as Chief Engineer. And we get to know communications officer Nano, who hails from a brand-new alien race, the Lirin. His people’s reclusive nature and perfectly balanced social structure are the focus of issue #9.
Issue #4 contains a two-page “sketchbook” showcasing the character designs of penciler Patrick Zircher. These portraits show how perfectly Zircher captured the essential aesthetic of “The Cage” while making characters old and new feel active and vibrant.
Zircher drew most of the issues. Michael Collins drew issues #9-12, largely sticking with the style Ziercher established. Javier Pulido penciled the last two, taking the look in a slightly more stylized direction with sharper angles and a flatter texture.
Overall, the series is a visual delight, its panels and pages full of bold lines, energetic action, and bold colors from inkers Greg Adams (issues #1-12) and Steve Moncuse (issues #13-17).
Voyaging from star beasts’ bellies to alternate timelines
Akiva Goldsman says Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be “very much adventure-of-the-week but with serialized character arcs.” Goldsman could just as well be describing Star Trek Early Voyages.
The book took Pike’s Enterprise from the belly of a gigantic, starfaring, flesh-scavenging beast (issue #1), to a planet populated by a tribe of still-warlike Vulcans (issues #5-6), to a farming colony struggling to fend off Klingon invaders (issue #7), and to other exciting and intriguing destinations.
Yet Abnett and Edginton’s carefully constructed character arcs, given life by the visual team’s first-rate efforts, make the series feel tightly unified. Seeds planted in early issues—for example, Dr. Boyce’s struggle with voices only he can hear in issue #3—pay off to great effect in later ones. Interpersonal relationships change, especially the tentative romance between Yeoman Colt and Joe Tyler. And the introduction of Commander Kaaj, a recurring Klingon adversary for Pike, gives the whole series a tension-filled throughline.
The series’ standout story is “Futures” (issues #12-14).
Thanks to an enigmatic alien artifact that resembles nothing so much as a palantir from The Lord of the Rings, Yeoman Colt finds herself in an alternate future timeline in which a Jim Kirk who washed out of Starfleet and his crew of renegades must team up with Captain Pike and the crew of the Enterprise-A—a hybrid of Pike’s original officers and more familiar faces such as Sulu, Uhura, and Saavik—to send Colt back in time while saving themselves from Klingon General Chang.
The plot hits many of the same beats as the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” but the “remix” of characters and timelines is fascinating and full of delights for long-time fans.
Presciently, it also anticipates the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Through the Valley of Shadows,” giving Pike a glimpse of his tragic future. If Star Trek Early Voyages, in its brief run, planned to deal with how Pike’s foreknowledge of his fate affected him, surely it will prove a plot point too tempting for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to resist.
The cliffhanger “conclusion” to Star Trek Early Voyages
Had the final story arc of Star Trek Early Voyages, which began in the next-to-last issue, fully played out, it might have claimed top honors.
In this story, Robert April, the very first captain of the Enterprise, beams back aboard for an inspection visit. We quickly learn that, despite his gracious handoff of the ship to Pike in issue #1, April hasn’t adjusted well to life in Starfleet’s upper echelons. (Although Star Trek: The Animated Series , in “The Counter-Clock Incident,” featured April as a commodore, he’s an admiral in Star Trek Early Voyages—either another nit to pick, or setting the stage for the untold tale of a demotion!)
April doesn’t approve of how Pike runs things. He’s resentful of the women officers—another odd note, given The Animated Series showed us April’s own wife, Sarah, was the Enterprise’s first chief medical officer—especially Number One.
While Pike is on an alien planet in an undercover reconnaissance mission, Klingons attack the Enterprise. Number One suffers a serious injury, and April seizes his moment to take command.
It’s a dramatic, high-stakes climax, never to be resolved. Marvel gave up its “Paramount Comics” imprint in 1998, and Star Trek Early Voyages came to a screeching, mid-story halt.
According to the Memory Beta wiki, the writers intended to write an afterword for the series’ re-release in 2009 as Volume 2 of IDW’s Star Trek Omnibus series, but ran out of time. And so we are left with the frustrating final text box: “NEXT: What happens will sadly be a mystery because this issue is the last!”
I’d love to see Mr. Nano or Engineer Grace onscreen. The final, interrupted storyline about Robert April’s opportunistic “takeover” of the Enterprise might make an epic season finale, keeping fans guessing until the next season began.
But I’d be surprised if Star Trek: Strange New Worlds adopts any elements from Star Trek Early Voyages. After all, the TV creative team will surely relish the chance to spin stories of new and unexpected people and events in a familiar Star Trek setting as much as Edginton, Abnett, and the graphic artists did.
And Star Trek Early Voyages will endure on its own merits. It’s an impressive and entertaining imagining of a Star Trek that never existed onscreen, but which admirably honors and expands on the one that did.