Gold Key Star Trek #2: Some of these characters are instantly recognizable!

Gold Key's Star Trek #2 came out the same month I was born.  We've grown up together.  We're both awesome.  Star Trek #2 edges me by just a hair in the awesome department.  And that hair is comic book Scotty's mousy brown versus James Doohan Scotty's glossy black.

Scripter Dick Wood takes the Enterprise and its crew to a mysterious glowing asteroid, but the story's title gives everything away-- "The Devil's Isle of Space."  While Targu, the leader of the asteroid's castaway population insists they're simply victims of an unfortunate accident, Captain Kirk soon learns they're actually a prison population.  Their culture has a novel approach to incarceration.  Prisoners go to various asteroids to await execution at some unspecified future time.  They're not even to know how they're to die.  Spock adds the rather alarming extra bit of information that the asteroid is going to turn into a "super nova."  I thought only stars did that, but Spock is a United Federation of Planets scientist, science officer of Starfleet's finest exploratory vessel and all-around genius so I'm going to bow to his superior space knowledge.  Firing squad, gas chamber, electric chair, injection, exploding asteroid.  Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, or so Sammy Davis, Jr. once advised us.



Spock certainly keeps his eye on the sparrow.  He goes right to work doing what he does best-- solving problems.  But this is a doozy, with moral implications.  Spock's boss Kirk has a bit of a personal objection to the execution methodology and he's got even more of one when said methodology includes his own execution and those of his crewmembers, for whom he feels at least partly responsible.  The obvious solution is to get the hell out of Dodge.

There are two complications.  The first, an energy field trapping the Enterprise in orbit around the asteroid, lasts only as long as it takes Spock to apply his vast intellect to solving its problem.  He invents "counter energy" to "flood the area," and that does the trick.  The second isn't so easily done away with.  Since the Enterprise transporters-- called the "teleportation chamber" here-- seem to lack the discriminatory circuits of the TV show's version, the landing party can't beam up... er... teleport back to the ship without bringing along a random selection of Targu's hardened criminals.

Fortunately for the landing party Spock isn't merely a top-notch astronomer; he's also a master of strategy.  He has pseudo-Scotty and company build a flying replica of one of the prison rockets and fools the inmates into believing they're receiving a missile's worth of fresh fish.  Surprise!  It's pseudo-Scotty and his merry band of rescuers with "fire bombs," apparently some sort of relatively harmless flash-bang devices they use to chase away the convicts.

Within minutes, the Enterprise rockets to safety and all's well except for the criminals who die when the asteroid explodes.

Let's take a look at some of artist Nevio Zaccara's embellishments to the Star Trek universe.  First, there are the knives he puts on the landing party's belts.  Well, you never know.  Some away missions may require whittling or making scrimshaw.

Also, he has Kirk mistake his tricorder for his communicator.  Well, not just Kirk, but everyone, including the narration.  Incredibly, it's a very screen-accurate tricorder as well, which makes it even more glaring to a hardened Trekker like myself, especially contrasted with Zaccara's free-wheeling version of the Enterprise interior and the crew's weapons, finally referred to in the comic as phasers.

Zaccara has a unique take on rendering likenesses among the secondary characters, i.e., anyone not named Kirk, Spock or McCoy: don't even attempt them.  Here's a typical scene:

Spock appears Nimoyish but with that makeup an artist could hold the pencil with a couple of toes and stand a chance of drawing a passable caricature. Next to him is McCoy, in a green shirt.  The eyebrows are sort of reminiscent of Deforest Kelley's.  That guy in the red shirt, however, is the Scotty I've been telling you about.  And between them, looking on from the back is Uhura.  Other than drawing her hair a little shorter than it appears on the show, Zaccara has done a bang-up job on Uhura.  Come to think of it, while Zaccara caricatured him accurately in the first issue, in this one Kirk often looks a lot like Sean Connery rather than William Shatner.  Interesting bit of casting that would have been, huh?  If not for that spy movie series...

Speaking of Uhura, the character actually has a non-speaking cameo earlier in the story and Zaccara produces a reasonable facsimile of Nichelle Nichols, but the colorist botches it in a way that's more obvious and egregious than Scotty's hair or anyone's service tunic.  And I'm not talking about the bright yellow dress she sports for some reason known but to our anonymous colorist.

Zaccara can draw this stuff any old way he pleases as far as I'm concerned.  Yeah, it's fun to pick at it but at least Zaccara produced vigorous stuff.  Because he seemingly wasn't tied to producing perfect images for licensing purposes-- make the bridge look like the TV show because we've got a playset coming out and we need the extra advertisement, please-- he just invents using his own unique visual flair and we get something kind of weird, kind of funky, definitely fun.  It's not his fault my brain has been trained over the years into an encyclopedia of useless crapola, but with startling gaps.  What Zaccara's art lacks in Trek accuracy it makes up for with energy and a kind of EC-ish feel.  That's a more than fair trade-off, plus it gives me something to write about 45 years later.

On that note, one final observation.  In what had quickly become a Gold Key Star Trek tradition, the plot ends rather abruptly and violently.

"The Devil's Isle of space-- nothing but a floating cloud of dust now!  It seems brutal to have left those people there..." Kirk says in the last panel.

"Execution by asteroid explosion is the way of their society!  We had no other choice but to leave them, Captain!" Spock concludes.  In other words, "To hell with them."

NOTE-- I'm off for a couple of weeks, so no updates until later this month.  I'm sure you're breathing a sigh of relief there!

Gold Key Star Trek #1... when Yeoman Rand wore the Phrygian cap!

I bought a lot of the Gold Key Star Trek comics last night.  I've owned the Checker Book Publishing Group reprint books for a while, and in all this time one thing has troubled me-- why does Yeoman Rand wear a red Phrygian cap in the first issue?

This morning I finally realized it's not a Phrygian cap at all.  It's the crazy cone-head braided wig Grace Lee Whitney wore as Rand and the Gold Key colorist-- whoever he or she was-- simply mistook it for a Phrygian cap.  Understandable when you consider how ridiculous and un-hairlike that wig looks in the first place.  I'd almost prefer a Phrygian cap to the thought of Whitney laboring under twenty pounds of lacquered yak hair or gorilla fur or whatever they made it from.

Comixology doesn't have the most accurate credits for this book.  Checker must have just provided them with a list, so they added everyone.  No matter, I enjoy reading blogs by those who know more than I do.  According to Martin O'Hearn at Who Created the Comics, it was scripted by Dick Wood, a writer I know nothing about.  Wood isn't listed on Comixology at all, but maybe someone can contact them and provide details.  O'Hearn also informs us Nevio Zaccara drew the comic.  That I actually knew.

The story is called "The Planet of No Return," but the planet itself is called K-G.  That's K-G for, as the script tells us, "Kelly Green," not K-Y for you Trek fans out there who are also into body lubricants and turning everything into a sex joke.  The space explorers investigate because as the Enterprise flies through a "space cloud," tiny spores seep through the ship's hull-- I'm no NASA scientist, but even as a layperson it seems that's some pretty slipshod ship construction-- and start raising hell within by transforming common guinea pigs into tentacled plant monsters.  In the immediate aftermath of the struggle, Spock directly contradicts scripter Wood by declaring the reason for the transformation is they tested the guinea pigs outside the ship a few weeks before and that's when the animals picked up the spores.

Make up your mind, Star Trek #1!

Kirk and his away team put on really slick body-hugging gray jumpsuits and beam down (from inside a transporter imagined as a glass chamber) to find K-G a planet where ambulatory plants have achieved dominance over animals.  As you can imagine, a group of animals transporting themselves down to investigate such a situation would soon find themselves quite literally in a world of trouble, Phrygian caps or incorrectly-colored tunics notwithstanding.  Blaster guns, as they call them here instead of phasers, are little help.  It takes the redoubtable Mr. Spock and his mathematical genius to calibrate the Enterprise's lasers (again instead of phasers) to a pin-point accuracy so he can fire it at the planet and free the landing party without cooking them.

Along the way you might have noticed most of the crew wear green shirts rather than gold, blue or red, although one unnamed crewperson does wear a red one.  This leads me to conclude the colorist had very little in the way of color reference to go by.  The same might be said of the Zacarra, who seems to re-use the same publicity stills for a few panels here and there and then his fertile imagination freely to create Enterprise interiors more fanciful than the show's.  A reader might at this point get the idea Gold Key took a somewhat casual approach to their Trek verisimilitude.  Hey, in the second issue Captain Kirk carries a knife on his belt and talks into his tricorder at one point, too.  Well, you don't go to Gold Key for accuracy.  These books are more about having fun.

That's probably why Wood has Kirk and company stammer uncharacteristically and use exclamations like "S-suffering solar showers!" to complain about their predicament.  And the rather abrupt and violent solution Spock comes up with for the dilemma of proliferating plant spores threatening the galaxy.

Comixology has a pile of these joyful little Star Trek books for 99 cents each, which is one reason we're going to be talking about them a lot as soon as the wife and I return from our overseas trip.  The other reason is simply that I love them!