Christmas Comics Cavalcade – Star Trek: The Next Generation #2 (DC Comics)

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.

Newest comic from Ohio Schools!

Here’s my latest comic for Ohio Schools Magazine. I was SUPER excited to do a Star Trek parody as TNG has become a slight favorite of mine over the last few months.

Chalkboard Drawings: The “cancelled sci-fi television” edition

 

thrift store finds: planet x

(Thrift Store Finds is a mostly-weekly “column” of sorts where I discuss some of the cool books I’ve happened upon in my neighborhood St. Vincent DePaul store. Please don’t mistake me for an expert on any of the books I am writing about… I’m just a fan of a bargain.)

In case you haven’t realized it by now, I’m a fan of kitschy stuff. The weirder and goofier, the better.

That being said, I pass up a LOT of kitsch on our weekly thrift store jaunts. Sure, I could have picked up that Gremlins-themed Christmas picture book titled “The Gift of the Mogwai” but after the initial guffaw that owning a crazy piece of pop culture ephemera… then what? What would I do with that book? Anything that you enjoy ironically has a very limited shelf life and I’m not looking to pad out my ramshackle collection with any more useless stuff. My garage is filled to the brim already, thanks much.

THAT BEING SAID…

When I found this paperback, I could not believe my eyes. I’m on record as not being much a fan of either Star Trek (in any incarnation) or The X-Men. They are two corners of geekdom with which I am altogether unfamiliar and in which I am uninterested to learn very much more than I already know. To me, Star Trek and X-Men seem like completely separate hubs of fandom that are best represented in this hastily drawn Venn diagram:

…and yet, Planet X, a Star Trek/X-Men novel, exists. Written by longtime Star Trek novelist Michael Jan Friedman, Planet X seems like an idea though of in a fever dream.

To me, this is the weirdest book I have ever seen. Who was the audience for this? Even people who can suspend their disbelief for one of these two franchises will surely be tested beyond the breaking point by being asked to smash them together haphazardly? Was there a vocal contingent of fandom that was crying out to learn who would win in a fight between Worf and Wolverine?

Someone pointed out to me that the genesis for this book might find its’ origins the fact that comic fanboys had cast Patrick Stewart as the perfect actor to play The X-Men’s leader, Professor X long before the X-Men movies were financially feasible. His nerd-cred was already quite large for playing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean Luc Picard. Perhaps that fact started the ball rolling toward making this insane idea a reality.. but even so, that premise doesn’t really ring true to me. I think Jon Hamm would make an awesome Captain America, but that doesn’t mean I expect to see a Mad Men/Avengers crossover anytime soon.

I don’t have any clever commentary beyond what I’ve said. I only just found this book; I had originally planned on writing about Archie this week. When I found this monster staring me in the face at the store and I couldn’t help but to share it. I may have to give it a read, if only to confirm Planet X’s place as the craziest find I’ve made in the thrift store up until this point in time. I should mention that Planet X is still in print, if you are so inclined.

thrift store finds: star trek: the motion picture: the pop-up book

Although I try to limit the majority of my thrift store purchases to comic paperbacks and books for my classroom lending library, I am not made of stone. When I encounter something especially weird, baffling, geeky, or otherwise neat, I will pick it up. Such was the case with Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Pop-Up Book!

What a name!

Confession time: I am not, nor have I ever been a fan of Star Trek. I did have relatives who were into the show however. My maternal grandmother was a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie. She read every Star Trek paperback she could get her hands on. She watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. She collected Star Trek plates from the Franklin Mint! Grandmas and Star Trek don’t normally go hand in hand, but mine did.

I don’t think Grandma’s love of Kirk and company affected my own interest in Star Trek either way… it was just something I never got a handle on. I tried to watch the TV show multiple times to no joy. All I could see were cardboard sets. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered in 1993, I literally FORCED myself to sit down and watch it every week for like a month and a half because, as a kid who liked comics, Star Wars, Monty Python, and all other matter of geeky ephemera , it just seemed like the type of thing I should be into. I just wasn’t.

It’s only been in this past year or so that I’ve gained any real appreciation for Star Trek. I truly enjoyed the rebooted Star Trek that was in theaters last year; it was a terrific popcorn flick and I liked it so much that I saw it twice (once in the theater, once as a double-feature at a drive-in). Enjoying that movie lead me back to some of the earlier films like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan which, to my surprise, was a truly awesome movie even independent of its Trekker origins. Some of the other Star Trek movies I’ve sampled since then… eh, not so much.

BUT, you say… if you’re not into Star Trek, why did you even bother to buy this book? I’ll show you why in a second, but before that let me just say something about pop-up books.

Generally, I am anti-pop-up-book. They are sometimes really clever and certainly Robert Sabuda deserves some kind of medal for the amount of craziness he’s figured out how to pour into his pop-up creations… but I have a two year old son. Pop-up books last about three, maybe four days in this household before you’re simply staring at a book full of torn pages and glue smudges. Most of the pop-up books we encounter in the thrift store are similarly afflicted. When I looked at ST:TMP:TPUP (awesome acronym), ALL the pages were in great condition. Whoever owned this book before it ended up in the thrift shop, it wasn’t a toddler. All the pages work beautifully from the transporter room

to the Enterprise coming out of drydock

and then you get to this page which made me laugh out loud. It has to be the most boring use of a pull tab ever employed in a pop-up book. I’m going to switch over to video to do it justice.

The copy on the page says: Mr. Spock reacts to all the excitement in his usual way.

There you have it. Star Trek! The Motion Picture! The Pop-Up Book! Eight pages of eyebrow raising fun.