Monday Night Murals: These comics were inwented by a little old lady in Leningrad.

Back in the day (before they invented Beta, VHS, DVDs, Blu-Ray, and stealing movies off the internet) comic book adaptations of movies were a great thing! You could experience the thrills, excitement, and Stooges of the movie, again and again and again! Because really, we didn't have any choice:



Ah, those were the days. You could buy yourself a movie comic for twelve or fifteen cents, get a Grape Nehi to drink along with it, plus a case of Dubble Bubble and a 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood and still have enough change left over to take Thelma Lou up to Mount Pilot for the picture show.

Alas, nowadays we have the DVD following the motion picture within five months later (fifteen minutes if it's a M. Night Shyamalan flick), so the days of the movie adaptation comic book are long, long over. Why, even if you were going to do a movie adaptation, you'd certainly time it to hit at the same time the film was in the theater because you've got a real small window of opportunity, right? I mean, it wouldn't make much sense to release a comic book adaptation a year later...or...twenty-seven years later after the movie, now, would it?

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan #1-3 (June-July 2009), art by David R. Deitrick
Click image to Scotty-size (movie version)

Um. Oh wow. Let me just ask y'all...who bought this?

The cover art's by David R. Deitrick—long-time Trek and gaming fans may remember his art on the covers of the FASA Star Trek roleplaying modules:



I'm not a big fan of Deitrick's Wrath of Khan comic book covers, to be honest. It doesn't work well as an interlocking mural (to make it line up you have to leave uneven empty space between the images). Kirk looks like he's searching for his car keys (they're under Uhura!), and Spock's head seems too small for his body, which reminds me very much of Gene Szafran's artwork for the early Trek novel Spock, Messiah!



Spock's got a big chest, he's kickin' ass, takin' names, and gettin' down! It's...not a very good novel (Read Siskoid's review of Spock, Messiah!). At least the jacket became less goofy when Bantam later reprinted them:



...but nobody could outdo the sheer dazzleriffic British cover that Corgi Books gave the novel:



I do like a lot of the covers on the later, extensive Pocket Books series, if you discount the first original Next Generation novel which had the Battlestar Galactica flying upside-down on the cover.



Really, who did they think wouldn't notice that?) I mean, you wouldn't catch a movie trying to get away with that...



As far as I'm concerned, though, my favorite Trek novel covers are the original James Blish Bantam adaptations, even the ones where the Enterprise had jet trails and was flying about fifteen hundred feet over the surface of an airless planet where the away team landing party had just...um, landed:



Now, the Blish books: those were timely and vital adaptations. Each book was a novelization of six different Trek episodes (what's the word you use for short story novelizations? Noveleenizations?), perfect to read when you didn't have reruns of the original 79 episodes syndicated on your local station. Blish stripped each hour-long story down to its action and character basics, where Alan Dean Foster took completely the opposite approach with his novelizations of the animated Star Trek series:



I loved the Foster adaptations as well—he'd add so much plot and background depth to each 23-minute episode that it would become a mini-novel. In fact, while the first eight books contained adaptations of three episodes, the final two each adapted (and massively expanded) a single animated episode! Those, in the days of few-and-far-between Trek, were great fun.

Still, for goofy, over the top, far-out-space-nut adventure and excitement, no Trek covers come even close to the infamous Gold Key comic book series that ran from the late sixties until just before the release of Star Trek: The Never-Ending Story (I mean, The Motion Picture):



Sometimes I like to pretend that Fred Freiberger killed Gene Roddenberry in '69, and this is what the fourth season of Trek woulda looked like.

Of course, you can't forget the comic book where Spock fought Slott!:



Judging from the story inside, that's a misprint for Scott, but I always like to imagine it's really Spock versus Dan Slott, scripter on many, many comic books, including Spider-Man, She-Hulk, and the sorely-missed The Thing, one of my favorite super heroseries of the past few years. And I think it would go something like this:



So yeah, there's that.

Anyway, next week: a better Star Trek mural. See ya then!