Star Trek #3 - Marvel Comics

STAR TREK No. 3, June 1980

Somehow managing to cram the concluding events of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” within this comic book adaption’s meagre eighteen pages, Marv Wolfman’s plot for “Evolutions” certainly moves along at a perplexing pace. But whilst the Brooklyn-born writer predominantly sticks to simply shoehorning in the movie’s overly-long dialogue-driven screenplay, he does still manage to inject the publication with an element of action by stepping away from the film’s theatrical release and having Admiral Kirk actually join Commander Spock on a spacewalk exploring the “alien intruder vessel called V’Ger.”

This departure from the ‘official version’ certainly adds some much-needed excitement to the adventure, whilst additionally giving Trekkies an intriguing insight as to what might have been had director Robert Wise not rejected the infamous Memory Wall scene during postproduction and Robert Abel’s Special Effects Team gotten fired by “Paramount Pictures”. Indeed, alongside Dave Cockrum’s proficient pencilling and Klaus Janson’s inks, the somewhat dynamic sequence depicting the U.S.S. Enterprise’s Captain being attacked by an aggressive crystalline swarm arguably provides the storyline with a golden opportunity to explain to its audience just what the two lead protagonists are thinking about without frustratingly reverting back to the script’s sedentary, corridor-based conversations.

Disappointingly however, once the half-Vulcan’s unconscious body is brought aboard the Constitution-class starship, this comic’s narration debatably once again becomes an unimaginative carousel of word balloons, which disconcertingly even manages to make the Admiral’s decision to activate the Federation vessel’s self-destruct device rather uneventful. Sadly, such lethargy also seems to even permeate into some of the book’s panels, with the American artist repeatedly neglecting to provide them with any sort of background whatsoever, and simply sketching the likes of Kirk debating with Will Decker across a noticeable blank void; “Each of us, at some point in our life turns to someone… A father, a brother, a God, and asks -- Why am I here? What was I meant to be?”

Perhaps this magazine’s biggest drawback though comes with its super-swift ending, as Commodore Matt Decker’s son directly keys in “the old NASA code signal that instructs the probe to transmit data”, physically merges with Voyager Six’s probe and suddenly disappears along with the gigantic extra-terrestrial spaceship within the blink of an eye. In fact, the sudden destruction of “the deadly V’Ger” debatably isn’t even seen, and instead the reader is just left with a solitary sketch of a lone U.S.S. Enterprise presumably orbiting the now safe planet Earth…

Script/Edits: Marv Wolfman, Pencils: Dave Cockrum, and Inks: Klaus Janson