Star Trek: Year Five #8 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 8, November 2019

Despite plainly containing far more action-packed space adventure than “Desilu Productions” could ever have hoped to finance for a single episode of the Sixties television series, Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly’s script for Issue Eight of “Star Trek: Year Five” probably still disappointed the majority of this twenty-page periodical's audience, with a significantly sedentary ‘third act’ that depicts the fish-faced extra-terrestrial Ayal wooing an astonished Hikaru Sulu, and surprisingly reveals this series' ongoing Tholian threat to have been organised by no less than Gary Seven of “Assignment: Earth” fame; “There, there, Isis…We have a universe to save.” Indeed, the abrupt halt to this publication’s pacing is almost palpable, once young Bright Eyes makes its ‘choice between its human friends or going home’, and bravely rescues Captain James T. Kirk following the starship officer’s miraculous exposure “to the vacuum of space for approximately five minutes.”

Fortunately however, this comic’s opening ‘laser-beam light show’ could arguably be seen as being worth its cover price alone, courtesy of the collaborative writing duo providing the U.S.S. Enterprise’s skipper with both a truly heroic moment as he blasts through a torrent of Tholian laser fire in a desperate effort to reach the safety of the Constitution-class starship, as well as a suitable ‘demise’ at his own hands once Kirk believes his ship’s only chance of survival is blow up the  mineral-based aliens’ tractor field with him still trapped inside it. Of course, thanks solely to the super-human exertions of Doctor McCoy’s ‘patient’ breaching its containment and successfully spiriting the dying captain across the stars, the first and only student at Starfleet Academy to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test manages to live to fight another day. But that still doesn’t stop the narrative from momentarily causing a fleeting doubt that William Shatner’s character might not make it after all…

Artist Stephen Thompson also manages to imbue this pulse-pounding passage with plenty of dynamism and break-neck speed. The Irishman does an incredible job pencilling Costume Designer William Ware Theiss’ somewhat clunky environmental units, and provides the silver lamé space-suits with a practical fluidity the actual fabric helmet with screen mesh visor props never had. Whilst his simple technique of sketching a few droplets of sweat upon Mister Spock’s brow, speaks volumes concerning the emotional effects the Vulcan is experiencing in the Command chair following his mind-meld “with a panicking adolescent volcano…”

Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly, and Artist: Stephen Thompson