Advance Review — ‘Star Trek: Red Shirts — Ghosts Of The 21st Century’ #1 Learns From Its Predecessor’s Missteps
by Tom Smithyman
Overview
This sequel series improves on its predecessor by not spending much time trying to make us care about characters who will only be killed off after a few pages. Instead it takes the most interesting aspects of that last run and builds on them.
Overall
8.5/10It turns out that the bright future depicted in Star Trek isn’t all that much different from today’s reality — at least when Gerry Duggan is telling the story.
Duggan, the veteran comic book writer, takes his first stab at the final frontier in Star Trek: Red Shirts — Ghosts of the 21st Century. Far from the utopian Trek where everyone gets along, this version involves Starfleet members stealing, killing, and getting killed in the most heinous ways. There’s phaser fire, a throat slashing, a bomb, as well as a Mugato rampaging through a group of less-than-honorable Federation types. Well, they call them “red shirts” for a reason.
This Duggan-written series is a sequel to a limited run that wrapped up earlier this year. In that one, which had a different creative team, red shirt Chip Miller was revealed to be a Romulan spy. This new series warps forward a decade to find Captain Miller having founded Section Null, a secret Starfleet security team. Under Romulan influence, the team acts like the mafia and steals from others in an attempt to rot the Federation from within.
Young red shirt Harry Deubert realizes what’s happened and tries to stop it, putting him at odds with Miller and his Romulan backers. It’s not your father’s Trek. That’s not a bad thing, though. More importantly, it’s not your father’s Red Shirts. That series ended terrifically with the Miller reveal. But the first several issues presented readers with a barrage of expendable characters they didn’t care about. The best aspect of it was seeing the interesting ways the red shirts met their demises.
Artist Scott Buoncristiano picks up on that in this new series with plenty of bloody (the red and green varieties) death scenes. Buoncristiano’s angular linework is different from many Trek titles, but it works well here by giving these characters an edge.
It’s not easy being a red shirt, and it’s not easy writing about them in a compelling way that keeps readers coming back each month. But Duggan and team have improved on past attempts, so it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.
Star Trek: Red Shirts — Ghosts of the 21st Century #1, written by Gerry Duggan, illustrated by Scott Buoncristiano, colored by Charlie Kirchoff, and lettered by Jodie Troutman — will be available in comic book stores and on digital platforms on July 22nd from IDW.
