Once more unto warp six, dear friends, once more

Howdy, kids and kidettes! Once again for no apparent media-related reason, let's turn on the short range sensors and check out some gorgeous but pretty wacky painted Star Trek comic book covers from England's late-1960s kids' weekly comics series TV21 and Joe 90, both created to showcase the adventure puppet shows of Gerry Anderson (read more about it in your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia). While the cover illustrations are frequently more faithful to the original look and sensibilities of the TV show (see more covers here, here, and over there) than much of the interior art and stories of the American Gold Key comics series run, there's still the occasional art misstep or far-out, over-the-top high concept that wouldn't quite play on screen, even with rapidly expanding Shatner. But they're really lovely work, and seldom seen here in the US. Let's peek at some of 'em!:





















All these weird and wonderful covers left me wondering what the interior art and stories of the UK Trek comics looked like. Use your Google-fu and you'll find a wealth of blog entries and wiki articles on the comics that show it to be a fast-moving series of serialized stories with some pretty decent art by great Brit artists of the time like John Stokes and Jim Baikie—slight but fun, and who gives a figgy pudding if they're "not in canon"? Hey, why not reprint these in trade paperbacks in the US and give us Trek completists a chance to read 'em, IDW or Checker? If you could reprint a story in which Spartacus and Starsky & Hutch team up to bedevil our enterprising crew, surely you could reprint the TV21 strips, in which nothing that silly ever takes place...


Well, whaddaya want? It's Star Trek, for Pete's sake. There's gonna be something silly in every story. And you know what? We love it all the more for it.