Peter David’s Star Trek: New Frontier was my gateway drug to Star Trek fiction. I never quite took to the numbered series books published concurrently with the television series themselves, feeling at best that all the pieces had to be put back in the box at the end and at worst that whatever was established in the novels could too easily be contradicted by the show episodes hence.¹

But New Frontier was, for one thing, excellent, and also arrived in the heady summer where Deep Space Nine was just about to start the Dominion War, Voyager had just met the Borg (in the wake of the exhilarating Star Trek: First Contact the previous year), and my Star Trek TV fandom was at an all-time high. Plus that the books weren’t beholden to a show week to week, plus they contained crossover material (Picard and Spock(!), what’s become almost everyday all these years later), which is what had fueled my Trek book reading thus far — “Invasion!,” the “Shatnerverse” books, anything that brought characters from different series together or that took place for The Next Generation after “All Good Things.”

So to be sure, I devoured the DS9 relaunch books when they came out. I’ll still testify S.D. Perry’s Avatar and those early books were the best of the bunch, Kira and Ro and Vaughn and Taran’atar and when and if Benjamin Sisko would return, though that itself was not the series' strongest point (I’m less enamored with TNG’s body parasites than some). Even as I enjoyed when the relaunch novels expanded to TNG and beyond — “Destiny,” “Typhon Pact,” up through “Coda” — my interest was still with an eye toward what was happening on that space station. If I didn’t always call DS9 my favorite Trek, it might have been the novels that, ahem, made it so.

It was great interest then that I marked the arrival of Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing’s new IDW Star Trek series, taking place once again in the aftermath of Deep Space Nine. Barely a year earlier the Trek “lit-verse” had ended, presumably so as not to have licensed fiction out there so specifically discordant with then-airing Star Trek: Picard. I wasn’t sure when if ever we’d see Trek fiction again set outside the bounds of the televised episodes, though I guess all we needed was a reset that worked within the bounds of new Trek continuity (and we know now too that the comics series wouldn’t run so long as to get itself into trouble).

[Review contains spoilers]

In view of all this, Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock accomplishes what it needs to. It’s unrelated, surely, but given that this fan has already seen no small stretch of stories mourning the absence of Sisko, his immediate in medias res return is a refreshing difference. In Trek fashion, the authors put him immediately on a starship; this didn’t work out so well in my opinion when David George did it (nor in Steve Mollmann’s well-presented opinion, either), but here it’s less of an ill fit for the character. And the crew is populated appropriately with new and old faces, New Frontier-esque.

For my tastes, the cast is a bit TNG-heavy, which is to say both Data and Dr. Crusher are present. That puts TNG representation at two, TOS at one, VOY at one, and DS9 — excluding Sisko and then Jake by association — at zero, unless of course Vulcan-with-secrets T’Lir is actually Odo. Admittedly I’m having trouble coming up with a good doctor replacement — Bashir is too on the nose and Pulaski doesn’t solve the problem — and Kelly and Lanzing do well paralleling Crusher’s experiences, the death of her husband and her son Wesley going off with the Traveler, with Sisko’s own metaphysical ascension.

On one hand, Ensign T’lir being Odo would mean the return of Odo; on the other hand, it would maybe be unfortunate if this Star Trek comic’s prominent non-binary crew member turns out not to actually be non-binary.² Artist Ramon Rosanas draws the characters with the pseudo-realism the book needs, but it’s unfortunate that T’lir’s spotlight issue — also with a Q cameo — is drawn with significant lack of detail by Joe Eisma. Nor is it quite clear why Jake is cooking T’lir dinner, whether this is romantic or if Jake has made friends on the ship or how it came about. T’lir and Ensign Lily Sato both felt largely indistinct to me, without the immediate presence of an Elias Vaughn or Shar ch’Thane.

I guess Worf’s presence is also a nod toward DS9, kind of. The very best part of the story is Kelly and Lanzing’s whodunit bait-and-switch, where the ally from whom Worf leads them to seek advice — Kahless, clone of the historical figure and new emperor of the Klingons — turns out to be the force behind the god-murders that Sisko is meant to stop. From a novels and shows perspective, it felt off to me that Martok would be so ineffectual as to be overshadowed by the figurehead emperor, but since the first crossover between Star Trek and the companion title Defiant is “Day of Blood,” I imagine we’ll see Martok before too long. And indeed the authors surprised me with Kahless as the culprit.

I thought Kelly and Lanzing got the characters voices right quite a bit. There’s a real difference, and I acknowledge the difficulty, of landing in comics the “sound” of characters whom we’ve heard speak over hundreds of television episodes versus mainstream comics characters who appear mostly on the page. But the creative teams use a variety of methods well for effect, like splitting the panels before the punchline of card-dealing Data’s “I learned from the best,” adding the occasion “ah” pause to Tom Paris' word balloons, or the outsized lettering in Sisko’s “Ha!”

For me, one hiccup was the argument between Worf and Sisko, perhaps because it’s more what the plot needs to spin off Defiant than something true to the characters. Despite Kahless' ship carrying a deadly weapon, that Sisko is ready to destroy and not just disable it seemed unusually bloodthirsty. And then, once Sisko understands that Worf’s son Alexander is on the ship, that Sisko is still unmoved felt equally off. Too, in that same argument, I was surprised to see Worf call Sisko “Benjamin,” very un-Worf-like; there’s also a couple of “Holy crap”s and “Jesus” that struck me as anachronisms.

But if we get past Sisko being confined to a starship at all, if we get past a bridge crew that’s Next Generation-heavy and that Montgomery Scott seems stuck in his Motion Picture outfit all these years later, and we take into account that Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing’s next volume promises to take us back to Deep Space Nine, then Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock is a fine enough start for this next iteration of the Trek extended universe. Whether intentionally or not, the authors avoid retreading the novels' old ground, so little of this feels repetitive, and I’m game to see where the authors take Benjamin Sisko before it all wraps up.

[Includes original and variant covers]