Authors: Mike Johnson / Tim Jones | Illustrator: David Messina | Page Count: 98
"Friends, Romulans, countrymen... we share the same ears."
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 Countdown is 99% water.
Set post-Nemesis (2002) it attempts to link The Next Generation cast with events from the film, acting as a kind of 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, artwork is generally good, with characters looking like the actors they represent; both light and shadow is 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).
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 probably a read-once-only kind of book for them.
The book collects together Star Trek: Countdown issues 1-4.
1½ red blobs out of 5
2 comments:
I think I'll stick to Firefly. :p
It cost me 49p in the reduced section of the book store. It was worth that much, I suppose. Only just, I'll only read it once. It was originally £9.99. Next time I'm out of arse-roll I can use it. Data won't be laughing then.
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