These little original issues don’t work out bad at all. Johnson uses this one to flesh out the Keesner character–Scotty’s little alien sidekick–and it’s pretty good.
Turns out the character is from some planet of little aliens where he’s ostracized for being too tall. He ends up in Starfleet–following an odd cameo from Kirk’s father–and Johnson tracks his career until he meets up with Scotty.
The stuff without Scotty is the best, because with Scotty around, Johnson has to focus too much attention on him. He can’t make Scotty too big a jerk. When it’s just Keesner, it’s an interesting enough look at life in Starfleet from an unusual perspective.
And the issue needs another page or so. The ending is truncated.
Molnar’s art is okay. He doesn’t do too well in the close-ups of Keesner, but does all right everywhere else.
It’s harmless stuff.
CREDITS
Writer, Mike Johnson; artist, Stephen Molnar; colorist, John Rauch; letterer, Neil Uyetake; editor, Scott Dunbier; publisher, IDW Publishing.
I think this issue has to be the best in the series so far. Johnson structures it around a redshirt who is writing home to his parents from the Enterprise. The character does have a name–and some ties back to the movie–but he’s sort of interchangeable.
The Tribbles storyline doesn’t have a particularly good conclusion. Not because of Johnson’s script. He does all right actually. The action moves from the Tribble planet–gives Uhura some Klingon to translate–back to the ship for the Tribbles on the Enterprise (but not like the original episode at all).
For the Tribbles issue, Mike Johnson goes for humor, which is appropriate.
Johnson closes this issue on San Francisco Starfleet Command. He opened the last issue with it, but these scenes have no connection. It’s a terrible bookend device, since it tears the reader away from the regular cast.
The secret to reading Star Trek is to concentrate on the words. Not on what people are saying, but the actual visual text. Focusing on the balloons and boxes, one can ignore the art. For a panel or two, I thought Molnar had improved since his last issue.
I’m trying to imagine what Phillips’s pencils must look like. He does so little work on faces–relying almost entirely on the colorist to fill in depth–I wish I could see the pencils. People probably look like blobs with eyes.
Johnson does a whole lot better when he’s not adapting episodes of the original “Star Trek.” Sure, it’s the whole point of this series, but this issue–the first original one–is leagues better than the previous ones.
