Star Trek: Boldly Go #12 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO No. 12, September 2017

Despite resolving Mike Johnson’s reimagining of the story behind Garth of Izar, it’s doubtful many of this twenty-page periodical’s 6,856 readers actually found much of interest within the comic’s mind-numbing narrative. For whilst Issue Twelve of “Star Trek: Boldly Go” provides a satisfyingly succinct conclusion to the former Starfleet captain’s spacefaring career by having him incarcerated within the Federation Asylum on Elba II under the care of Doctor Donald Cory, the book contains little else in the way of action or even enthralling exposition as to just how the “decorated, highly regarded officer” came to be rescued from his transporter accident by the Antosians, and subsequently acquired his miraculous shape-shifting powers.

Indeed, apart from the briefest of battles when the U.S.S. Endeavour momentarily fires upon Captain Jiang’s vessel, hardly anything occurs within the former “Superman/Batman” author’s script whatsoever. True the writer does additionally depict a watered-down ‘rip-off’ of Lee Erwin’s ending to the January 1969 “Star Trek” television story "Whom Gods Destroy" by having Sulu stun Kirk’s duplicate instead of an absent Mister Spock. But such a second-rate solution to Garth’s masquerade is no-where enough to forgive such pointless scenes as Doctor Groffus grumpily demanding his skipper sit their “regular physical examination as scheduled” or a perplexed Leonard McCoy correcting his commander as to who his current chess opponent is; “Of course I’ve been playing with Ellix. It must have just slipped my mind…”

Similarly perplexing is Johnson’s bizarre logic behind the criminally insane captain’s revenge upon the U.S.S. Heisenberg and Eurydice’s plan to ultimately defeat him. Both of these sequences rely heavily upon Kirk’s Aegis class cruiser supposedly having the ability to control the entire vessel from his Ready Room, and the female salvage expert’s spaceship being able to somehow transport her ‘boyfriend’ aboard the Endeavour despite it being engaged in combat and therefore having its shields raised..?

With such insipid and uninspiring penmanship it is perhaps somewhat surprising just how good Megan Leven’s cartoon-like illustrations are for this substandard comic book. Fortunately however, the “child of the Picard generation” clearly has “Star Trek” ‘etched into her DNA’ and considering that this magazine’s plot contains plenty of Kirk ‘screen time’ it’s lucky the artist has “just reached that stage with Chris Pine” where “I can more or less draw” him from memory.

Writer: Mike Johnson, Art: Megan Levens, and Colors: Marissa Louise