Captain Kirk on NBC...

You know, "The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC."  I don't think I'm any great shakes as an artist or renderer, but I do like my coloring abilities.  Not so much the shapes there, but the choices.  They may not be exactly accurate, but they're very rich and interesting to look at.  

Don't you agree Kirk's shirt is a strange and fascinating garment?  I think the originals were made of velour, which gives them a thickness and surface texture that comes across as particularly Star Trekian on TV.  Nothing wrinkles exactly like a Starfleet uniform tunic.  Now that we have Blu-Ray, we can see the nap more in early episodes.  The third season seems to have substituted some other material for velour.  Also, Kirk's tunic is longer and more tapered to his body.  His hair is a little longer, too.  

But the point of all this blather is what the heck color was Kirk's shirt in the first two seasons?  We like to say "gold," but it's kind of a greenish-gold that sometimes appears yellower and sometimes a kind of off-green (if I can be permitted to create such a thing).  The cartoon series gave him a yellow-orange shirt.  I've seen art with that corrected to something closer to the live action color, but those never look quite as charming to me.  My Mego Kirk definitely had a shirt much closer to yellow.

I read somewhere the Kirk shirt (and by extension, the Chekov and Sulu shirts as well) is actually a color known as tenne.  This is an orange-brown that can go so far as to be quite yellow.  It worries me.  I'm a worrywart about color.  

It's probably better to be like the colorists at Gold Key.  In the early issues of their Star Trek series, they simplified their lives by making everyone's shirts green, except Spock's.

Star Trek #6 (December 1969), art by Alberto Giolitto

Re-downloading those Gold Key Star Trek comics inspires this Captain Kirk ink drawing...

Not really.  Actually, it was the other way around.  I've been writing about Comixology and drawing lately and working on this drawing reminded me I needed to get those Star Treks back onto my phone.  Any excuse for drawing Trek characters, though, is a good one.  Grabbing the new Comixology iPhone app requires we download all our comic books again.  There are a few series I absolutely cannot do without:  Kamandi, New Mutants, Teen Titans and, of course, Gold Key Star Trek.  I'd add New Gods and Mister Miracle if they were available.  There's one more, but I blog about it elsewhere because it falls outside our mission statement here.  It's nice being able to carry around entire runs of Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man, too.

The first thing I did when I started the app is fill one very important area of it with Kamandi.  Yesterday, I started the process of re-acquiring my digital Trek books from IDW.  You have two options.  One is to purchase the individual issues, which is my preference.  Be warned, though-- for some reason the first few substitute the old Checker Publishing softcover artwork for the original comic book covers.  Then they start in with the original and very lovely photo-montage covers and-- even better-- the off-model fully-painted ones!  The other option is to buy them in little groups as collections.  At $11.99 a pop, that's probably the cheaper of the two, but for me, money is little or no object.

Well, even if you think I'm an ass for shilling for Comixology-- I haven't meant to; it's just worked out that way-- please enjoy Captain Kirk wearing something of a smirk.  I need to fix his left eye, mouth and chin, but I'm almost as satisfied with this drawing as ol' Kirk here is with himself!