Marvel Super Special #15: Star Trek The Motion Picture

Dec. 1979 - Yes, you can relive the gripping excitement of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in comics form! See! Enterprise crew members talk! See! them talk some more! See! beloved characters act like they've been scripted by screenwriters who have never heard of the characters before!

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of the first Star Trek movie. But that doesn't mean the comic won't be any good, so let's see...

Behind the nice cover by Bob Larkin (that Nimoy likeness is particularly spot-on) and some stills from the movie on the inside cover, we have the adaptation proper, scripted/edited by Marv Wolfman, drawn by the unusual combo of the late, great Dave Cockrum and Klaus Janson, with colors by Marie Severin. Marvel pulled out all the stops for most of these movie adaptations, using color and extra-nice paper.

I'm sure most of you know the plot, and this comic follows it pretty closely. Thankfully, though, scripter/editor Wolfman cut out large chunks of dialogue and extraneous scenes, so its only a couple pages before the V'ger plot kicks in, when in the movie it felt like that took approximately seventeen hours.

Wolfman captures each crew member's particular way of talking fairly well, though trying to write out the particular patois of Commander Scott looks awkward as heck:

Fun Fact: Letterer John Costanza charged extra for superferlous apostrophes. He bought a boat with the money he made from this issue.

Anyway, the combo of Cockrum and Janson works fairly well, if a bit ragged at times. The printing doesn't help; there are some spots where lines drop out, others sort of glob together.

Other times, though, a little more attention needed to be paid. Like after the horrifying scene where two Federation officers are obliterated by a malfunctioning transporter, where Kirk tries to reassure Yeoman Rand it wasn't her fault:

...why is Kirk smiling like that? This is serious, dammit!

Anyway, there's lots of nifty "special effects" in the art to convey star patterns, planetoid surfaces, and the like, many of them with color holds, and it works pretty well.

The storytelling is also pretty good, like this inventive page where we see what the Enterprise sees, as well as their reactions:

The adaptation runs 52 pages, which means it moves at a much brisker clip than the movie, so in a lot of ways this version works better. It's no classic--there's only so much you can do with this (IMO) ponderous Think Piece of a story, but Wolfman, Cockrum, and Co. give it the old Marvel try!

There's also a couple of text pieces, one a brief history of Star Trek by Tom Rogers, another is an interview with Jesco von Puttkamer--no, not another Denny O'Neil pseudonym, Jesco was a NASA staffer and served as the Science Advisor to the film. A pretty egghead interview for a comic book movie adaptation, I have to admit.

The final few pages consist of a Star Trek Glossary, again by Rogers, who gives us the official definitions for stuff like Nogura, Sensor Swarms, and Vegans ("High-domed aliens, members of the Federation", who presumably don't eat anything made from animals). Good to know.

It's ironic, really, that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was never adapted into a comic, even though it was by far the most action-packed, comic book-y of all the movies!