Subject: IDW takes Star Trek franchise boldly onward | Author | Messages | 
Brent Frankenhoff
Posts: 3930
 | Posted: 1/3/2008 10:01:32 AM | Following on its 2007 Star Trek titles, including the Star Trek: Year Four ongoing series, Klingons: Blood Will Tell and Star Trek: The Next Generation mini-series, and the Alien Spotlight one-shot specials, IDW has announced its plans for 2008.
Billed as “Star Trek: Second Stage,” the franchise expands to encompass Star Trek book properties, revisit popular stories from the original TV series, and expand Star Trek: Year Four’s concepts with new mini-series. Creators who have signed on to the new projects include writers Peter David, D.C. Fontana, Scott and David Tipton, and artist John Byrne.
IDW Publisher and Editor in Chief Chris Ryall said, “We’re incredibly proud of the work that we produced in our first year of Star Trek publishing, and the quality of those titles has really allowed us to recruit some of the best Star Trek storytellers from across several different mediums. In the first year, we took the IDW starship on its shakedown cruise. For 2008, we’re taking the storytelling beyond the Final Frontier.”
IDW Star Trek Editor Andrew Steven Harris said, “This will really be an epic year for Star Trek, and we want to make sure our books do justice to the scope of it all. We’re expanding our slate of titles to four issues a month, so that there’s a feeling of weekly appointment reading for our audience, like a Star Trek TV show. At the same time, we want each title to have the significance of a Star Trek film, so that each series is a seminal comics event. That’s the level that we’re shooting for with ‘Star Trek: Second Stage.’ ”
Highlighted with a “Star Trek: Second Stage” logo, mini-series already on the schedule include:
Star Trek: New Frontier (March)
 New Frontier creator Peter David celebrates the 10th anniversary of the New Frontier saga with its first comics series. The five-issue mini-series is illustrated by Stephen Thompson. In "Turnaround," the most dangerous experimental vessel in the galaxy -- a prototype time ship -- has vanished, and it appears that the man who stole it is none other than Starfleet Admiral Edward Jellico. Only Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the crew of the Excalibur have a hope of finding him before the ship, intended purely for scientific exploration, is used to disrupt the space-time continuum. IDW will premiere its new Quad Cover format with the first issue with four separate covers bound directly onto the same issue.
Star Trek Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment (April)
 D.C. Fontana, who started her career as Gene Roddenberry’s assistant during the original series, and went on to write some of that series’ most memorable episodes, as well as the animated Star Trek series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation, now adds Star Trek comics to her resumé. Teaming with co-writer Derek Chester and artist Gordon Purcell, Fontana presents a five-issue mini-series set during the Enterprise’s fourth year of its original five-year mission and follows on events of “The Enterprise Incident,” an episode Fontana wrote.
In the original episode, Captain Kirk posed as a Romulan to steal the adversarial aliens’ cloaking device. In the comics story, Federation efforts to fully adapt the cloaking device to Starfleet ships leads to an experiment gone awry, trapping Kirk and Spock on an Enterprise out of phase with space itself. At the same time, Romulan forces close in on the starship, intent on claiming revenge for their stolen technology. Later chapters in the series will provide a sequel to the first two issues, as the Klingon Empire -- with its own agenda -- suddenly enters the fray. The Sharp Brothers are the cover artists for the mini-series.
Star Trek: Assignment Earth (May)
 Writer and artist John Byrne begins his work at IDW with an Alien Spotlight: Romulans one-shot in February before moving on to this five-part mini-series in May. Introducing the cryptic Gary Seven, the original series TV episode "Assignment Earth" was Star Trek’s Season Two finale and a pilot for an ongoing series that never materialized. Now, Byrne will bring Roddenberry’s dream to life, delivering the spin-off 40 years after it would have debuted. The series tells the tale of the interstellar time traveler and his Earth-born assistant, Roberta Lincoln, as they covertly confront threats to the past so that they can save Star Trek’s future. Each issue moves forward one year in time, beginning in 1968.
Star Trek: Mirror Images (June)
 IDW Editor in Chief Chris Ryall joins Scott and David Tipton and artist David Messina for a four-issue mini-series set in Star Trek’s Mirror Universe in Star Trek: Mirror Images.
The story is a prequel to the original series episode, “Mirror, Mirror,” with James Kirk plotting a takeover of the ISS Enterprise from Captain Christopher Pike. Other Mirror Universe characters, including McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura, who were more or less overlooked in the original TV episode will also have their agendas revealed in the course of the series.
A second Mirror Images series, spotlighting The Next Generation crew, is slated for the second half of 2008, written by Star Trek Editor Andrew Steven Harris and screenwriter George Strayton.
The art shown here for Star Trek: Assignment Earth and Star Trek: Mirror Images is promotional only and not final cover art.
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