WHO KILLED CAPTAIN KIRK? (CLASSIC STAR TREK )

Rating:
Summary: Poor artwork, but brilliant stories, characters & humour
Review: A compilation of some of DC Comics' version of the Star Trek series, this is a must for Trekkie fans who enjoy good adventures, interesting characters and great humour. This comic book has three self-contained adventures loosely connected together: a gang of space outlaws massacre Federation and Klingon colonies in order to provoke a war; a powerful telepath has a nervous breakdown and turns the Enterprise into Dante's Inferno; and Captain Kirk is the victim of an attempted murder by one of his own crew!

The artwork by Tom Sutton and Ricardo Villagran is hardly top-of-the-range, but it has its good points: the various aliens in Starfleet uniforms pacing up and down the Enterprise are amusing, and the close-ups of the faces (such as Kirk's after he has yet again been beaten by Finnegan) are good too.

However, it is Peter David's scripts which make up wonderfully for any shortcomings. David pills up the humour and the ironies beautifully. The friendly bickering between Kirk, Spock and Dr "Bones" McCoy must bring a smile to any reader.

For me though the best thing about this compilation is that the emphasis is not just on the original cast members (as is usually the case with comics based on Star Trek series), but also on new characters created by DC; in this case some of the junior officers of the Enterprise (the next generation as it were). These include the Klingon defector Konom (signs of Worf here) whose marriage to the human Nancy Brice is put in question when they meet ... half-human, half-Klingon dwarf! There is also the moody William Bearclaw who has to go to great lengths to convince Kirk that he is not the bigot the captain takes him to be, and his long-suffering girlfriend Elizabeth Sherwood. Particularly entertaining is Lieutenant M'ress, a feline humanoid who teasingly flirts with Sulu (in his introduction, George Takei tells of how he tried to extend the part of Sulu; one wonders if an affair with a cat-like alien is what he had in mind).

Best of all, however, must be Commander Sean Finnegan who, in spite of a childish sense of humour, leads the investigation into the attempted murder of his old Starfleet Academy rival, James T. Kirk. Much to the despair of his more serious associate, telepath Eather Van Horne, Finnegan is very engaging, not to mention irreverent, especially when dealing with "Jimmy". After years of getting the upper hand against Klingons and Romulans, Kirk finally meets his match with this fun-loving Irishman who leaves him lost for words in spite of all his attempts to get even! David makes his characters so much more than they might have been!

Rating:
Summary: It's good!
Review: At first, I was dissapointed that this book was a comic. I read it anyway because of my curiosity that the writer of the comic is Peter David. I found that this book was quite fun. It has a good story and humor (When "Bones" saw a monster carrying its head) and much more. However, the drawings were not nicely done. There are some inaccurate colours and pictures. Nonetheless, this is a good collection for Star Trek fans!