IDW's Star Trek comics

I don't seem to have posted anything about the current line of Star Trek comics yet. I intended to hold off for a few months until I had enough issues to make some kind of worthwhile opinion, but frankly, the first miniseries, The Space Between, nearly crushed my enthusiasm.

I have every IDW comic published so far -- issues of The Space Between, Klingons: Blood Will Tell, Year Four, Alien Spotlight, Intelligence Gathering -- but I've only read the first three complete stories.

Klingons: Blood Will Tell, written by Scott and David Tipton, was the best of the three. Strong art, an interesting Klingon perspective on some familiar encounters, and an actual story arc from issue to issue that came to a good conclusion. The stories were well written and well paced.

The Space Between and Year Four, both written by David Tischman, suffered from the editorial decision to do more or less standalone stories in each issue. It didn't work -- in almost every issue of the two series, I had the feeling that pages were missing. Stories were sketched out, not told in full, or so it seemed to me. Twenty-two pages of comic story is not a match for 45 minutes of screen time. You cannot develop a story and guest characters well enough in so short a space. The Space Between had some arc elements, but there again not enough space was given to make those elements as clear as they should have been. It's hard to figure out the point of doing miniseries of standalone stories instead of just an ongoing series of standalone stories.

IDW's standard practice is to do a five- or six-issue miniseries and reprint it shortly thereafter in an omnibus paperback. From what I read, the comic industry as a whole is moving to collections like these, to the point where there's some concern whether the old-fashioned comic book format is being skipped over by fans waiting for the paperbacks. If the books are the main delivery system, why not tell longer stories? Why not give us feature length stories instead of telling a whole story/episode in what feels like the equivalent of the teaser and the first act, wrapping things up in time for the commercials?