Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

1 Comment

  1. BadCatMan
    June 7, 2015 @ 11:06 pm

    I've read The Star Lost twice, more or less.

    First time, a few years ago, I was trawling through my university sci-fi club's collection of Trek comics, just some random donations. There were a few original issues of this story, though not the first one or two, and maybe a later one was missing. I assumed the shuttle was lost in a previous adventure – and that's pretty much the case as regards the second story. It seemed strange at first to divide the focus between two distinct storylines, but IIRC they come back together.

    It stuck in my memory though, because, a year or two later, I found the 1993 collection in a charity booksale for a few dollars and grabbed it to get the complete story.

    Now I've started rereading it, up to this issue. It's pretty good, though doesn't strike me as much as it clearly does yourself. I've read a lot of tie-ins (they're the modern pulps!), and perfectly mimicking the style of the parent series, and doing it better, is kind of a basic requirement, IME. There's a lovely focus on the "lower-decks" characters on the shuttle that makes the Enterprise seem bigger, which is always nice. The story goes to great lengths to have characters tell us their feelings, or to tell us other characters' feelings (Selar seems to read Worf's mind; there must be something between them), which reads as quite odd or labouring the point, but I'm not sure there's a better way of doing this type of story in a comic.

    There's a few structural problems at least in the second issue: crossing between two-hander conversations makes it unclear who's talking, like Worf turns on two entirely different people. And when the Vulcan officer informs Selar's parents, the whole panel showing his arrival is repeated, so he's invited in and suddenly outside again, yet somehow coming back. Did he forget something? I guess he should have been erased in the second panel, but it spoils the quiet, private, behind-closed-doors moment of Vulcan grief.

    I'm looking forward to the rest again though.

    I don't know about DC's superheroes, but their licensed stuff around this time was great. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons/Forgotten Realms series could have been generic fantasy, but were sublime. IDW could really learn a thing or two.

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