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| Images copyright PARAMOUNT & IDW |
IDW have just released this 100-page Super Spectacular reprinting GOLD KEY STAR TREK tales from the 1960s and '70s. It's a neat little package, no doubt intended to whet the appetites of fans for the Gold Key Archive editions, the first of which was released in 2014 and are still ongoing. (This mag reprints Gold Key issues #s 1, 8 & 14.)
It's reassuring to know that we Brits weren't the only ones to get things wrong with our home-produced Star Trek strips when we first started publishing them; Gold Key were also 'off-model' from the TV series in several ways with their attempts to cash-in on GENE RODDENBERRY's 'space western', as is detailed in an essay by JOSEPH BERENATO.
A great item for all Star Trek and Gold Key fans, killing, as it does, two birds with the one stone. Available now from all good comics shops. What're you waiting for?!
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| I'm sure you can stand repetition, as this is the original |
11 comments:
Once upon a time I would have been a fanboy foaming at the mouth about the off-modelness of this comic's art (believe me, my self-righteousness was second to none), but in my dotage I'm finding it harder to do - I can't help suspecting that the artist received a couple of B&W 8x10 publicity shots of the main cast, plus one or two of the Enterprise*, and from those meagre resources be expected to extrapolate the rest - there's a good chance Star Trek wasn't screening on Italian TV, and even if it was....hey, he's a professional artist, not a fan.
*this suspicion is based on an interview with Mark Evanier in The Comics Journal, where he mentioned that in doing the adaptation of "The Love Bug" for Western, Dan Spiegle received two reference photos for Herbie: a side view and a front view of a VW.
PS If Gillian Duxbury and Caroline Munro are unavailable, a little Julie Ege goes a long way.
Wasn't just the art, BS, 'twas the way the characters spoke, what things were called, etc. As you say 'though (just like the British strips), the writers and artists weren't given very much background info or visual reference when they began working on the strips.
And where've ya been? There's been quite a lot of Julie around this blog in recent times.
That Enterprise Mutiny splash looks vaguely familiar. Could the story have appeared in a Star Trek annual in the UK around 1973 of 1974? I Remember a story with a Captain Kirk doppelgänger who bugged me by talking throughout the story of "burning" people with phasers rather than shooting them.
Oh yes, found it on Amazon. Definitely Star Trek annual 1974.
That explains why the look of the strips seemed familiar to me. I must've seen them at some point in an Annual - although Mighty TV comic also published some of the Gold Key Star Trek strips so I might be remembering them from there.
I fondly remember those '70s Star Trek annuals but at the time I didn't notice any differences from the TV show !
Well, if you were to buy this mag, CJ, you could read all about them. Go on, dig into your wallet.
Wikipedia said that Gold Key's artist had not seen the show, and that he was working from publicity photos.
Similarly, their Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea comic was in the works before the TV show premiered, and they were working from rough drafts and preliminary sketches, so several details (including the Flying Sub) looked different.
And Fireball XL5 appeared in TV Comic before the show had premiered on TV. It was clear the ship had been based on an earlier design in its development when it was called Century 21.
I have a number of the the Star Trek reprints from Checker so may pass on this one, though a Star Trek fan I am also a fan of the art by Alberto Giolitti, the chief motivation behind the purchase. First took a liking to his work on Turok and also Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (have the two volume collection of those also) as well as the various stories he did in the Gold Key anthology comics, such as Twilight Zone and Karloff's Thriller, to name but two of many. His work came out of the studio of artists he founded later on, not surprisingly as the guy must have had more work than he could handle, so not always easy to tell what he drew and what some staff member contributed to. It seems common practice with movie and TV adaptations, back then at least, for the artists working on an adaptation to have little to work with if the publication is due to co-incide with the movie of TV show, scheduling wise. I wonder if a lot of the companys putting out Gold Key collections are staffed by people who grew up reading them as kids, the product of this company being overlooked for many years while the output of more high profile publishers like Marvel & DC were being collected at a rate of knots.
I don't remember ever seeing the Checker reprints, PC, but having said that, the last 10 or 15 years have gone by so fast, I may have seen them, but, in memory, just assumed they were the IDW ones because it doesn't seem that long ago. I'm very impressed by the quality of IDW's output - their U.K. Star Trek volumes are very impressive, reproduction-wise. I think a lot of stuff gets republished these days by childhood fans of the material, rather than because of any potential wider general public interest in it. Labours of love, in other words, inspired by nostalgia.
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