Star Trek: Year Five: Valentine's Day Special - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE: VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL, February 2020

Having apparently “always wanted to write a proper, serious, epic romance for James Kirk”, Paul Cornell’s narrative for “Star Trek: Year Five: Valentine’s Day Special” must surely have fallen well shy of its mark with the majority of this one-shot’s audience. For whilst the twenty-page periodical undeniably provides a surprisingly pleasing overview of all the different uniforms the Federation officer has worn during his illustrious career, the man’s frequent dalliances with “fellow Starfleet Captain Laura Rhone” pale in comparison to his child-bearing relationship with Doctor Carol Marcus, ill-fated intimate involvement with Janice Lester, or even short-lived affair with social worker, Edith Keeler.

Indeed, rather than simply inundate the reader with a flurry of frivolous flirtations set amidst the Enterprise commander’s star-spanning voyages, the “award-winning writer of prose, comics and television” may well have proved much more successful in his goal by simply expanding upon this book’s opening premise of the ‘love birds’ foiling the alien abduction of an Ensign whilst meeting for the first time on shore leave. Instead, the pair’s long-lasting rapport, which oddly was never important enough to warrant mentioning during seventy nine televised episodes and six movies, is apparently just built upon the U.S.S. Drake’s female skipper getting “bored with my book” and leaping straight into bed with “the only student at Starfleet Academy to defeat the Kobayashi Mary test” to ‘confer about paperwork’…

Mercifully, what this comic lacks in meaningful penmanship though, is more than made up for with eye-catching artwork, courtesy of some superbly illustrated storyboards by Christopher Jones, which really manage to imbue each scene with all the ambiance of its appropriate period in Kirk’s profession. Of particular note are the American artist’s panels depicting the Admiral’s tenure at Starfleet Headquarters and “acclaimed” costume designer Robert Fletcher’s uniforms, which arguably look far better upon this book's finely-drawn figures than they ever did when worn by the actors in the 1979 film “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”. Admittedly, Cornell almost ruins the serious tone created by this visual treat by having a miniature black hole rather (in)conveniently appear “within lunar orbit” of the Earth, but even this lackadaisical contrivance can be partially forgiven following James’ grim-faced order to his beloved’s starship to self-destruct and save the planet with an anti-matter implosion; “The order is given.”

Story by: Paul Cornell, Artist: Christopher Jones, and Colorist: Charlie Kirchoff