Trek Thursdays: Panels Of The Final Frontier #1

As part of our year long Star Trek celebration, the Comicon.com team wants to celebrate all aspects of Star Trek. That means stuff like comics, toys, books, even weird quirks like recipes. Starting this week, we’re going to launch the irregular companion to our regular Trek column, Trekking Towards Sixty, focusing on Trek’s storied comic book history, Panels of the Final Frontier.

The Star Trek comic book license has bounced through a lot of hands. Trek comics have been published by Gold Key, DC Comics, Marvel Comics (twice), Malibu and more. Since the early 2000s, they’ve made their home at IDW Publishing who has added literal volumes of lore to the Trek canon. They’ve ranged from out there crossovers with the Legion of Super-Heroes and Transformers, to film prequels, to semi-canonical adventures filling in important gaps in the lore.

One of the more recent and interesting additions was the Mirror War saga.

“Mirror, Mirror” is easily one of Star Trek’s most famous episodes. The second season episode of the original series featured Kirk, Uhura, Scotty, and McCoy transported to a dark alternate universe due to a transporter malfunction. The quartet found themselves at odds with this darker, and arguably more evil universe, and sought a way home. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would later revisit the infamous Mirror Universe in a series of fan-favorite episodes (which blended DS9 and Star Trek: Voyager characters), and Enterprise featured it in one of the prequel series’ most well-received two-parters.

But the cast of The Next Generation never encountered their evil opposites.

That left it a story ripe for the telling by IDW. Over the course of four limited series by writers David and Scott Tipton, we met the Mirror Universe counterparts of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D, as they fought a war of conquest on behalf of the dying Terran Empire.

I sat down with Star Trek: The Next Generation — Through The Mirror, excited to sample this massive saga. Where the majority was the saga chronicled the conquest of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the I.S.S. Enterprise, Through The Mirror brought Picard face to face with … Picard.

The Tiptons teamed with artists Marcus To, Josh Hood, Chris Johnson, Carlos Nieto, and Debora Carita, with colors by Brittany Peer, Jason Lewis, David Garcia Cruz, Fran Gamboa and Jay Fotos, letters by Andworld Designs and a series of connecting covers by J.K. Woodward.

The story kicks off when the Enterprise assists a Federation outpost in investigating a series of mysterious threats. The investigation turns into a full-blown mystery when Worf discovers a doppelganger of one Enterprise crew member, who engages in a firefight with his away team. Soon, they discover the doppelganger is just a small part of a much larger plot that could bring another universe’s war to Starfleet’s doorstep.

Even though this is the middle chapter in the saga, this was a fantastic read. By knowing the basics of the Mirror Universe, I didn’t need to know who the Mirror Picard or his crew was, or what their deal was. I was able to jump in, pick up on the action, and follow this conflict between crews easily.

The two downsides to this book were the crowded cast and the art team switching issue by issue. The former is easy to forgive — the Tiptons had to go from an already large 7 person cast to another 8 characters. The art, on the other hand, was good, but was extremely inconsistent issue by issue.

But we did get to see how Jean-Luc Picard would handle an evil version of himself. We got glimpses of our favorite crew members in evil twin mode. And best of all, it ended on a running phaser fight through the I.S.S. Enterprise.

It’s a lot of silly, goofy fun, but it’s executed so well. Sure, Mirror Picard has some serious guns, Mirror Troi is a cackling evil maniac, and Mirror Wesley is a cyberpunk hacker. At the core of it though, this is a story about our favorite heroes twisted and broken, and it does its job well.

Star Trek: The New Generation — Through The Mirror is available as both a standalone collection and as part of a larger omnibus edition featuring more of the Mirror War saga, and is well worth the time to pick it up.