Star Trek - The Key Collection: Volume 5

Star Trek: The Key Collection/The Enterprise Logs #5

by Len Wein, Alberto Giolitti (Illustrations)

Volume five collects issues #34 through #44 of this archetypal comic book series! Story titles include "The Psychocrystals," "A Bomb in Time," "Furlough to Fury," and more!

Genres: Comics, Star Trek, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2006

About the author

Len Wein was an American comic book writer and editor best known for co-creating DC Comics' Swamp Thing and Marvel Comics' Wolverine, and for helping revive the Marvel superhero team the X-Men (including the co-creation of Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus). Additionally, he was the editor for writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' influential DC miniseries Watchmen.

Wein was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2008.

Reviews

[WhatShouldIRead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good storytelling and illustrations in this volume. I hadn't realized there were any comic books for TOS (duh!) so was pleasantly surprised when I came across this one at a library book sale.

I hope to be able to find the other volumes and spend some enjoyable time reading through those, too.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I passed this book up at the library several times because the art was so atrociously bad.

I'm glad I opened it and actually started to read it, because the storytelling is authentic to the TOS period. It genuinely felt like these were stories they had wanted to tell in the show, but couldn't because of budget concerns. That's not all good, of course, because TOS stories are all over the place, but I enjoyed the experience nonetheless.

The art really is bad though. And it feels clear that Uhura and Sulu are almost completely written out for racial reasons - when they do appear, Sulu's skin is practically neon yellow, and Uhura's skin is barely perceptibly darker than the rest of the cast's (Chekov is completely absent). Also, Scotty, the remaining caucasian character with a European ethnicity, has had his role significantly enlarged here (though the way his accent is rendered causes him to say "mon" instead of "man", so my head-canon is that comic Scotty is Jamaican). I can chalk that up to publishing pressure, but it doesn't feel very Star Trek to not have pushed past those concerns.

[Mike McDevitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange new world where Spock the vegetarian eats beef stew... Scotty solves his problems with spankings... and McCoy's xenobiologist daughter Barbara is either a brunette who's great with animals or a blonde who's not.

See a robot-brained hippie thawed in the present and wrongfully talking peaceful Earth into disarming. Crystal people feed crystal dogs bowls of fire. Giant babies getting younger. Pirates and gods and fish-men persecuting air-breathers. And our four main heroes nude together and laughing like madmen from the tickling rays of the steri-bath.

Gone is the Universal Translator: please enjoy the telepathic Linga-Discs. Long-distance X-Ray scans are state of the Federated Planets' technology, but a time-travel booth is barely worth mentioning.
What this comes down to is a quaint romp, utterly incompatible with the TV program continuity. A dimension all its own.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the stories in this volume were some of the best that I have read from the Star Trek Gold Key publications of the 1960s and 1970s. It looks like they may have started to get a bit choosey on the issues, since this collection skipped a few (collecting issues 34, 36, 38-43), so I'm guessing Checker Publishing had an idea they weren't going to get around to publishing the rest of them. There's admittedly some electronic CD version that supposedly includes the rest of the issues that were not collected, but I prefer reading in actual books, so I doubt I'll get around to hunting down a copy unfortunately.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe my expectations have dropped after reading the earlier books in this series, but this collection seems superior to the previous volumes. The art manages to look fairly consistently like the characters, and the stories are . . . well, they are often silly and illogical, but some at least have moderately clever plot elements. There seems also to be some sense of developing and deepening continuity, as McCoy's daughter is introduced and recurs in a later story. Still probably really only suited for Star Trek completists with a high tolerance for silliness.