In the past two years, I’ve become a fan of Star Trek.
Previously, I never had much use for Star Trek. I was always more of a Star Wars kid growing up and, if I’m being honest, I found a lot of the Trek canon to be nothing but a slow, boring slog as a teenager. Star Trek was the first Geek Certified property I never quite got a handle on enjoying… and it perplexed me!
“By all rights,” I thought to myself back in 1992, “I should be incredibly interested in Star Trek! Look at all these other socially unacceptable pursuits I undertake that make me comically unappealing to the opposite sex! Comics! Toys! Video games! Science Fiction! Star Trek fits right in there!”
…and what was worse, I now realize it was never a better time to be a Star Trek fan than in the 1990’s. Ample opportunities to become a Trekkie existed in the during that decade, with a hefty amount of new spin-offs and movies being cranked out by Paramount. Still, nothing ever really appealed to me outside of kind of enjoying Star Trek: First Contact when I saw it in theaters.
Trek caught my attention in a big way in 2016 when I suddenly found myself very discouraged about the state of humanity in general. 2016 seemed to usher in a cruel, stupid new paradigm for my country and I didn’t like what I was seeing.
As with many before me, I found solace from the harsher realities of the world in some of the loftier ideals of Star Trek. The idea that some day… some day, humankind sheds the base, antagonistic bullshit we always seem to be caught up in and we get to explore the stars?
During much of the last two years, I’ve needed that kind of hopeful escape.
At any rate, I started getting into Star Trek: The Next Generation in a big, bad way.
Christmas doesn’t come up much in Star Trek. Besides a couple of throwaway lines and scenes over the last 50 years, no Star Trek series has ever directly tackled a holiday episode. That’s why I’m doubly excited today as both a fan of Star Trek and a fan of Christmas comics to look at Star Trek: The Next Generation #2, published in 1987 by DC Comics
…an honest-to-God Star Trek Christmas story. Look at Captain Picard defend that Christmas tree!
The comic was written by Mike Carlin with art duties from Pablo Marcos, Carlos Garzon, and Arne Starr.
Teachable Moments 