Star Trek's Marvel Comics (1980s) // Star Trek's 55th Anniversary
As we mentioned the last time with our exploration of Star Trek comics, the comics released by Western Publishing’s Gold Key Comics imprint were weird and bizarre. However, their comics only came out until April of 1979, when the rights were bought up by Marvel Comics. Now, why would they want to do that?
Oh, of course. For those who don’t entirely know, Marvel was in the middle of a weird period best described as “flailing in a mad panic.” According to behind the scenes information in works like Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe, sales were in the middle of a massive slump in the late-1970s. Television was in the middle of taking away a lot of readership, and the intermittent cartoons and TV shows Marvel released were just not drawing in new readers like they had hoped. It didn’t help that some of the works were ones like The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS.
It was shockingly a ratings success, but the show was cancelled in 1978 when CBS began to cancel all of their superhero works. Shows like The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman lived on, but there were also works like the ill-fated Captain America movies, the nearly-forgotten Doctor Strange movie, and attempts to spin-off The Incredible Hulk into Daredevil and Thor would meet equal refusals from the highest powers at CBS. Shazam and Isis had rounded off their children’s programming on Saturday mornings, and it just struck the fear of God into CBS that they were shoehorning themselves into a stereotype.
Comic fans were also remarkably vocal about all of these adaptations that almost none of these shows featured anything but the hero. Hulk only fought gangsters and slum lords, but the Abomination never appeared. Wonder Woman? Well, she fought Nazis when she was on ABC, but never saw actual comic villains like Cheetah. Spider-Man also never even saw so much as a Kraven the Hunter.
So, Marvel was in a panic of ways to improve sales, since TV shows weren’t working. What to do? Well, it turns out that 1977 brought along a lovely little movie franchise for them to invest in. We’ve covered it loosely before, actually:
That’s right! Star Wars is what saved Marvel Comics. Allegedly, they didn’t have to pay a dime for the license, as Lucas just wanted some more stuff to hype his upcoming and mostly-ignored movie. The third issue arrived on newsstands just as the movie came out in theaters, and it’s argued that the subsequent demand for Star Wars comics basically pulled Marvel out of their financial woes. It also made them go completely bonkers with lashing out and grabbing as many licenses for movies and toys as possible, hoping each one would somehow result in another sales juggernaut like the last.
Let’s be honest: All of these deserve an article of their own for how completely insane they are. Espeically Godzilla and Shogun Warriors.
And frankly, this would get insane in the 1980s, with Marvel making an imprint called Star Comics for children’s cartoon licenses. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves… because we need to go to April 1979!
You see, Marvel snagged the license for Star Trek to release another in their Super Special Magazine series. Much like Marvel’s obsession with nailing movie, TV, and toy licenses to try and find the next Star Wars, Marvel would license movies to convert into massive comics that were triple-sized in content and the scale of the other magazines on the newsstand rack. These featured such masterpieces as…
Yep. Perfect things to write a comic book about.
The rest of the book will be screencapped from the 2019 IDW re-release, which has some color adjustments, but looks infinitely better.
In this massive book, we have Marv Wolfman pulling double-duty as writer and his own editor, and the duo of Dave Cockrum and Klaus Janson as the artists. Marie Severin colored the pages, while John Costanza letters the book. To be fair, having Wolfman edit himself isn’t as problematic as it could be, since he has to stick to an early version of the script for The Motion Picture. Ideally, these movie tie-ins would be written off of a shooting script, but The Motion Picture is notorious for continually being shot, re-shot, re-written, and re-edited to cobble together something resembling a movie. This leaves the script being a few revisions out of date, but does give us a peek at alternate scenes!
It also allows Marv Wolfman to be really pretentious. We open with the same story, with Klingons being vaporized by a weird glowing cloud, and for Spock to realize his hippie days of hiding out in the deserts of Vulcan are over.
In our first weird change from the final movie, Commander Sonak exists. Sonak was intended to be a stand-in for Spock until some really obsessive fans almost bullied Paramount into getting Leonard Nimoy back. His role would be similar to Xon, another Vulcan planned for the aborted TV series Star Trek Phase II that would have been made had Star Wars not shown that movies about space and lasers were profitable. Ideally, they would have been Vulcans who were science officers (which raises questions about the roles of Vulcans in Starfleet and Kirk’s possible racism or desire to literally replace Spock), but ones who were fully Vulcan with an interest about humans. This would later be recycled into Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and executed far better than any of the early scripts show for Sonak or Xon.
Since Leonard Nimoy hopped onboard, both Sonak and Xon were given the oust. Sonak actually made it to the final cut of the movie, unlike Xon. Luckily, we get to see that scene as well!
The horrible, mentally-scarring death of two beings in a malfunctioning transporter. There’s something to be said about the lack of subtlety at which they dispose of these characters. I will give Cockrum and Janson serious credit for something I never thought I would see again: Disco McCoy.
Well, that and the slash teasing of Kirk/McCoy.
deForest Kelly wore that beard like a master, and it’s a shame we never got to see McCoy wear one outside this scene.
The movie adaptation continues without really any major issues or weirdness to note as the pages turn, however. The alien menace of V’Ger actually does look fantastic in these pages, considering it was unlikely that the art team at Marvel would get much more than sketches of the costuming, sets, and ships. The prototype Deanna Troi, Commander Ilia, is killed by the probe from V’Ger and replaced by an identical robot. Commander Riker version 1.0 Matt Decker tries to stir memories of their romance, and I have to give Wolfman and everyone on the book credit for making those agonizingly slow scenes move quickly.
The real eye-catching change comes when Spock jumps ship to go explore V’Ger. The original script, and first shooting, had a sequence where Kirk and Spock flew together through a corridor before they were attacked by prisms and Kirk had to head back. We actually get to see a version of that here, beyond leaked black and white set photos.
To be honest, it’s likely a good thing they cut it. Once that scene is over, the book rolls back into the plot of the original slow and methodical movie, albeit with some utterly fantastic art. The climax is fantastic and trippy, as well as giving Wolfman a chance to use his original narration once more for a bookend.
The magazine’s adaptation of TMP ends with an essay about Star Trek and how the fans have revived it thanks to syndication and their love of the franchise. It’s written by Tom Rogers, who seems to have been utterly forgotten about by the internet. He has no bearing in Marvel Comics that I can see, but the Grand Comics Database cites him as someone who wrote essays and thought pieces for Marvel’s “magazine” output from 1978 to 1980… and then vanished.
It’s hard to tell if this comic was a sales success, but since this was the era before streaming, and even before easy home video… yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked. Because of that Marvel decided to strike while the fans were ravenous, and made Star Trek into an ongoing series. The only problem is, they don’t seem to have had any idea on what to do with the property!
The original magazine was released with a pull date of December 1979, meaning it came on newsstands in the summer of 1979 at the earliest. The ongoing Star Trek comic hit newsstands in January 1980. And literally re-printed the Super Special across the first three months.
You can see why I opted for the IDW reprint.
Through some miracle, the book survived three months of treading water to completely change up creative teams almost constantly. Marv Wolfman left after issue 4, and the art duo of Cockrum and Jason left after issue 7. Eagle-eyed fans will notice that this is one of the first comics at Marvel that legend Louise Simonson worked on, under the name Louise Jones. As the creative teams shuffled in and out, the art would go back and forth on quality, but the real killer was the lack of character development or original characters to use for the illusion of change or growth.
This means the comic was left with some really shallow, well-meaning comics that ran out of ideas. I mean, this is the issue with licensed comics. Without clever ideas, the comic can’t really feature anyone change or grow, as a future TV show or movie would undo any change they attempted, or just ignore it. It still doesn’t quite explain some of these weird issues, though:
Unfortunately, most of these issues suffer from Silver Age cover syndrome, where the cover is only loosley related to the content within.
And it’s actually the first of those three covers we’ll look into, and it’s a perfect example of how well-meaning and bad these comics could get. Issue 10, Domain of the Dragon God was written by Michael Fleisher, with Leo Duranona and Klaus Janson on art. Rick Parker lettered, and Carol Gafford colored the book. Having come across a planet with a mysterious magnetic field, Kirk sends Spock and McCoy down to the planet on a shuttle to investigate the planet’s surface.
True to Star Trek tradition, they nearly die on the way down and crash-land. However, the planet has life on it. Spying from a distance, McCoy and Spock view the primitive life forms as they go about their daily lives.
And they’re literally the worst “savage minority” stereotypes you can imagine. These people are superstitious, violent, and speak in somewhat broken English.
Spock and McCoy are thought to be magical shamans by both sides of a local conflict. McCoy is saved by the rebels who are fighting against the local warlord, while Spock is considered a slave to him and put with the other natives.
McCoy shatters the Prime Directive by teaching the natives how to make bows and arrows to improve their chances. However, despite being shown literal technology, these “simple savages” just do not get how it’s not magic.
Uuuuuuuuugh.
With the evil warlord and tyrant defeated, the leader of the rebels claims command. Now the visage of the warlord that looks over the valley will be destroyed… and replaced with the new leader. So he, too, can look over the valley and sacrifice maidens to the Gods for their victory.
No. I’m not kidding.
Oh, but don’t worry. McCoy and Spock yell at them for being wrongheaded, and nearly escape with their lives when these natives decide to kill them for speak out against their Gods. Kirk swoops down with a shuttle that magically isn’t harmed by the weird magnetic fields, and the two heroes of the story just brush off their ruination of a culture by just going “meh.”
Look. Star Trek isn’t perfect. 1980 wasn’t perfect either. However, I would like to think that we as a culture could have looked at this issue and gone “is there a reason why all the aliens look like horribly racist depictions of black people?” It’s also possible that these were intended to be an “alien” aboriginal people from Australia, but that simply raises the question of why the aliens had to be aboriginal. This is a comic book, and we could use the usual rubber forehead aliens, or even some supremely odd designs of pure aliens with tentacle arms and leaf heads. It is a decision that was made, and it’s weird and bad.
Maybe the fact that McCoy and Spock’s meddling resulted in worse troubles is a reflection of Vietnam, which was a very fresh wound in the national psyche at the time. However, this also results in a horrible view on the North and South Vietnamese peoples, both racist and overly simple. This issue is just bad.
And, as if to put a sour cherry atop the weird racism and bad politics, it ruins the promise of a Vulcan Conan starring Spock.
Luckily, the crimes the rest of the books create are just those of being utterly boring. The book lasted until issue 18, released in February 1982. By this time, it was well known that another Star Trek movie was in the works, and even early trailers showed how awesome it was going to be.
But Star Trek’s sales just couldn’t justify waiting for another 4 months to have a sales bump. It’s unclear if Marvel lost the license at this point, or if Paramount pulled the license. DC doesn’t look to have swooped down and stolen the license, however, as their own adaptation would skip The Wrath of Kahn and just pick up assuming Kirk and company would be trekking around the universe after the movie with the first issue coming out in February of 1984.
When it comes to the few collections Star Trek has gotten, most of Marvel’s content from this era has been forgotten about. That is far from a bad thing, so far as I’m concerned. Thankfully, the later comics we’ll look at will be far better in quality and content.
