Star Trek: New Visions
{4/5} “The freedom to be who we are. To express our humanity, each in our own unique way! This is what our Federation of Planets believes.”
Star Trek: New Visions (8 volumes), written & photomontaged by John Byrne, published in 2013-19
When the Enterprise receives a signal from Delta Vega, Captain Kirk knows that his old friend Gary Mitchell is still alive in some form. When both Kirk and Spock from the Mirror Universe beam aboard, anything could happen. After Kirk destroys the Doomsday Machine they run into a member of the species who made it — who’s been pursuing it for 3 million years. When they run into Harry Mudd again he somehow looks exactly like James T. Kirk.
This is a series of comic books using a photomontage style similar to the “fotonovels” from the old days. The photo collage nature of the artwork, although not my favourite, at least has the merit of being different than any other comic book.
Some storylines are sequels to episodes and others are independent. I enjoyed some stories better than others. “Robot” is a nice story with an Asimovian flavour. “Resistance” was about the Borg — if you’re going to go against continuity, you have to have a good reason and this one didn’t. Also, I didn’t care for the ending of “Time’s Echo.”*
The characters mostly seem like themselves. Some storylines don’t have quite the depth that I’m used to from other comic books or novels.
I previously read Star Trek: Alien Spotlight — Romulans by Byrne (it’s collected in Star Trek: The Original Series Omnibus).
Spoiler alert
*Kirk says they’ll remember their descendants from the alternate timeline but they never learned much about them.