Star Trek: Boldly Go #10 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO No. 10, July 2017

Group editor Sarah Gaydos was being extraordinarily optimistic in this comic’s “Open Channels” afterword when she suggested Issue Ten of “Star Trek: Boldy Go” featured a “soon-to-be classic story”. In fact, despite Mike Johnson’s twenty-page long script supposedly focusing heavily upon the return of Scotty “to the Yorktown base to check in on construction of the new Enterprise”, it instead disappointingly spends the vast majority of its time following “the comic debut of a beloved alien first seen in the film Star Trek Beyond” known as Kevin the Teenaxi…

Admittedly, the diminutively-sized aggressively paranoid alien provided Simon Pegg’s movie script with precisely the “sort of light-hearted episode” which the English screenwriter apparently wanted as an opening sequence, and the tiny creature’s inadvertent beaming aboard the USS Enterprise, followed by his subsequent attendance at Kirk’s birthday celebration, provided the flick with a modicum of digitally-rendered humour; "still no pants". But such a miniscule character was arguably always going to struggle single-handedly to entertain this title’s 7,804 readers, especially when the central plot revolves around the blue-shirted extra-terrestrial treacherously stealing a starship’s “central control stalk” in order to demonstrate his loyalty to Steve, the “Grand Audarch of the Teenaxi People.”

Indeed, as “bottle stories” go, Johnson’s narrative concentrates far too much upon its jokes, such as the Teenaxi Delegation foolishly believing that without its Captain’s chair a Constitution-class vessel is unpowered, and nowhere near enough on the tale’s straightforward logic. For example, why does Commodore Paris and Scotty immediately forgive Kevin and later actually still offer him a place at Starfleet Academy, when this entire comic has been about the alien abusing their trust in order to infiltrate the Yorktown’s security and criminally steal from the Federation? 

Sadly, Tony Shasteen’s artwork for this inadequate adventure also proves somewhat substandard. The Art Institute of Atlanta graduate can clearly pencil some excellent-looking likenesses of actors Christopher Pine, Simon Pegg and Zoe Saldana, as well as the complexities of a partially-progressed starship. But as this book predominantly features Teenaxi, the illustrator is in the main ‘forced’ to simply sketch a seemingly endless carousel of similarly-shaped aliens, and their rather inedible meal-time “delicacies.”

The regular cover art of "STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO" No. 10 by George Caltsoudas