Are You Ready For Star Trek Year Four?

Continuing a TV-comic crossover trend that’s becoming very common, IDW Publishing is picking up where the five-year TV voyage of Star Trek left off. The Enterprise was on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds but only made three years on television.

The franchise’s famous aficionados, among the best in sci-fi or any genre kept the movement going and now Star Trek is one of the most profitable and recognized brands there is. IDW is presenting a slate of highly anticipated Star Trek comics we’ve talked about here. D.C. Fontana, who IDW refers to as the “Grande Dame” of Star Trek, will helm the continuation project.

It will begin with “The Enterprise Experiment,” a sequel of sorts to the classic Trek episode “The Enterprise Incident,” also written by Fontana. In that episode, Capt. Kirk goes undercover as a Romulan to steal that race’s cloaking technology. In the new story the Federation tries to adapt the stolen tech and of course, things don’t go as planned. Kirk and Spock end up on an Enterprise phased out somewhere between time and space. Oh, and the Romulans don’t take the theft lying down and stage an attack at this most inopportune time.

Other canceled shows that have carried their stories to comic books include genre faves Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Comic books allow them to be free of restrictions like worrying about a special effects budget, or whether the show before them is a good lead-in. As a comic book fan myself I love the idea, I just hope we’re not reading the continuation of Jericho in book form next year.