Star Trek: Boldly Go #15 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO No. 15, December 2017

Grown from a plantlet, having never known “my seed-father”, this third instalment of Mike Johnson’s “Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations” story-arc initially follows the life-growth of James Kirk until, “not long after… defeating the Romulan viroid that threatened Earth-Garden”, he takes his “place in the captain’s node aboard” the wooden Starship Enterprise and inexplicably suddenly encounters a non-botanical Lieutenant Uhuro, a female Captain Spock and “the only gas-based Starfleet officer here”, Montgomery Scott. Disconcertingly, this utterly bizarre plot-twist is perturbingly the basis for the much of the narrative to Issue Fifteen of “Star Trek: Boldly Go” and arguably must have made many a reader’s head hurt with its incessant chopping from the planet Risa, an “Earth where the augments won and humanity was enslaved” by Khan, and an alternative Vulcan which both houses a relocated Starfleet Command, as well as being the Federation’s last bastion against Nero and the Borg-enhanced Romulan Star Empire.”

Indeed, this twenty-page periodical’s narrative contains so much information involving the differences between numerous respective realities that the vast majority of the comic’s 6,441-strong audience probably didn’t even have the ‘where for all’ to spot “IDW’s Star Trek Kelvin Universe (and Discovery) wordsmith” imbuing Kirk with a certain “old Vulcan trick”, when the American author rather lazily depicts “the acting Captain of the Federation Starship Endeavour” over-powering the incredibly annoying Simon Grayson with a simple nerve pinch; “Learned it from a friend of mine.” Admittedly, “Johnson personally considers the current films [are] not set in a split timeline, but in a very similar reality, which allows him to ignore elements of canon that should hold true for both realities”. Yet ever since the March 1968 television episode "The Omega Glory" in which Spock admits having tried to teach his Captain the skill, it’s been canon that few non-Vulcans are capable of utilising the unconsciousness rendering technique and Kirk is most definitely not one of them.

Equally as frustrating as this comic’s space-time Einstein-Rosen bridge-based shenanigans is Tana Ford’s artwork, which whilst excellent at depicting “Captain Plant-Kirk” is far less successful in illustrating Chris Pine’s ‘Silver Screen’ personality and the lead character’s ‘big’ battle against the nauseatingly de-Vulcanised Commander Grayson. Crudely pencilled, with limbs that could seemingly out-stretch even those of the Fantastic Four’s leader, Reed Richards, the Lambda Literary Award-finalist’s combatants disappointingly appear somewhat facially-disfigured and implausibly bendy at a point in the book which surely should have been steeped in angry menace, as opposed to Lampoon-like ludicrosity.

Writer: Mike Johnson, Art: Tana Ford, and Colors: Mark Roberts