The greatest Star Trek captains and their crew all together in one comic crossover? I’m getting shivers!

IDW’s Star Trek: The Q Conflict launches this month — from writers Scott and David Tipton and artist David Messina — promising of a cavalcade of talent that will prove to be unmatched in ambition by other Star Trek stories.

If you wanted to attempt a television story with four crews from different iterations of Trek — something akin to the current run of DC Comics superhero shows on The CW — there’s no way you could wrangle the casts from so many of the series for filming and de-age them to meet fans’ memories… but you can in the comics.

I remember Chris Claremont telling me that comics are a medium free of physical or monetary restraint. Comics are literally pure imagination-based storytelling vehicle that no film producer could ever hope to match. If you have the talent, anything that can be imagined, can be realized between twenty or more illustrated pages.

It’s a new level of cool when you apply that to Star Trek and you get to see the combined talent of multiple generations of Trek in one storyline. Instead of focusing on just one iteration, the Tiptons go all out to bring together the entire primary casts of the original Star Trek series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager for this six-issue miniseries. (Enterprise is excluded since that crew had no contact with the Q.)

You see, here’s the thing: Star Trek loves to play with the idea of humanity challenging limits, including being with no limits. If you think back to classic Trek, there is an entire litany of characters with seemingly unlimited power at their disposal: the Metrons, Trelane, Apollo, and so forth. The introduction of Q in TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint” shouldn’t have been a surprise; before the Enterprise-D had a chance to really show its stuff, it was already faced with an omnipotent — yet hardly omniscient — being ready torment and experiment.

Q is different from the array of Original Series omnipotents, in that unlike the one-shot, all-powerful villains, he returned over and over to became a fan-favourite. Of course, this means that he is the perfect conduit to introduce a conflict between his species and other similarly advanced races. In this comic, that conflict is responsible for a number of abnormal spatial anomalies — a collection of unnaturally occurring super-novae in a short window of time, just as seen in Voyager’s “The Q and the Grey.”

Of course, time means nothing to omnipotent beings — but as any long-standing fan knows, any conversation with Q leads to more complications, and the Tiptons pounce on that to create an ambitious story that any Trek-lover will thrill at seeing.

The Tiptons are comic fans at heart. While they love Star Trek, and there is no doubting their vast knowledge, they also know that an effective comic technique is a team-up – and this is an ultimate team-up. Make no doubt about it, Q reaches back, forward and sideways in time to bring four super-teams together to make for an awesome team-up that will make Trek fans delight in anticipating the story the combined abilities of these fan-favourite characters can deliver.

This is a set-up issue. It introduces the battlefield, the generals, and the soldiers in this conflict amongst all-powerful entities. But it’s a set-up issue that any comic reader and Trek fan can really get excited about as Picard’s steadfastness, Sisko’s bravery, Janeway’s cunning and Kirk’s — well, everything — combine to promise a story of Trek epic proportions.

David Messina has the art duties on this book. Messina’s been around and it must be a major joy for him to involved in a project like this. after all, he gets to work with not just one Trek crew, but four of them. Like I said, there’s a great sense of promise in this book.

• Both ‘A’ and ‘B’ covers come from David Messina. The first sees a montage of cast from all four Treks with a menacing Q in the background. Spock, Seven, Odo and Captain Picard are featured, while  Sulu, Sisko, Chakotay and Data represented on the second with Ayelborne the Organian positioned behind them. I like the second cover out of these, because while Q is already mentioned, it’s exciting to see a bit of the story on the cover in learning that the peace-loving Organians as a source of antagonism to the Q Continuum.
   
• The retail-incentive ‘A’ cover is absolutely stunning. George Caltsoudas gives us an amazing propaganda-style poster that features all of the advanced races: Q, Trelane, the Metron, and Ayelborne of the Organians enthroned and above the four captains stand over a banner that reads Virtute and Gloria. It clearly looks like a recruitment poster but the level of detail in this stylized piece captures a multiple of different vibes. It’s an incredible work.
   
• The retail-incentive ‘B’ cover is a double-page spanning cover of all the casts and their adversaries in a true spectacular format. A grinning Q imposingly looms in the background creating the perfect atmosphere for this book. This is J.K. Woodward’s contribution, and it’s a real winner in my book — definitely my favourite.

Imagine a television episode like this. Well, you can’t. There’s no way that the casts could ever interact with each other in this format, given the disparity of the series, the fact that actors age – this is what comics are about. Legends from four classic Trek franchises – together for the first time. This will be an epic storyline.

The Tiptons are comic guys, but better, they’re Star Trek guys to boot. You can’t get better storytellers of a comic in this franchise than writers who are experts in their fields, but also dedicated fans as well. This is more than just a story though; with the level of talent on this book, this will be a labour of love.