Star Trek

San Diego Comic-Con is underway, bringing over 130,000 people to enjoy the pop culture extravaganza taking place inside and outside the convention center. There is a lot to see and do every day during SDCC. More likely than not, if you don't go in with a plan for experiencing the things that you most want to check out, you'll miss them!

Seen fleetingly throughout the recent Star Trek movies, the Starfleet Academy will take the spotlight this October for a miniseries at IDW from Mike Johnson, Ryan Parrot, and Derek Charm. Set partly during Spock, Uhura and Kirk's time in the academy, the series is set to focus not just on the well-known characters, but introduce a new group of cadets as well.

Although cosplay has been present for decades within the comics, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, social media has played an integral role in the thriving communities of costuming that exist, such as Cosplay.com and the Superhero Costuming Forum. Over the years, the cosplay community has evolved into a creative outlet for many fans to establish and showcase some impressive feats of homemade disguise, craftsmanship, and sartorial superheroics at conventions.

This weekend at Wondercon, IDW and DC Comics announced a new crossover that will send the Green Lantern Corps to the Star Trek Universe in a story titled Spectrum War this July. Written by long-time Star Trek writer Mike Johnson and penciled by Angel Hernández, the miniseries will feature both the current Corps and the current Enterprise crew from the Chris Pine/Karl Urban film era.

Around Halloween, there is nothing I like more than a comic where horror elements start to creep in when they clearly have no business being there. I mean, I'll gladly read eighty issues of Tomb of Dracula and I love plenty of comics that are just Hellboy grumping at werewolves, but if you give me a comic where all the spookums and haints show up out of nowhere and start hassling Spider-Man or somebody, I am delighted. That's why I was pretty interested when pal and occasional ComicsAlliance contributor Kevin Church suggested that I add Star Trek #4 to my annual scareathon, mostly because he sold me on it by telling me it was the comic where the starship Enterprise found a haunted house. In space. He wasn't kidding: This is a Star Trek comic where the Enterprise finds a haunted house in space. And that's after Dracula shows up.

IDW and BOOM Studios are planning an epic crossover between two of the world's biggest science-fiction franchises; Star Trek and Planet of the Apes. The crossover is between the original Star Trek crew and the original Planet of the Apes apes (and their damn dirty human pals), and the story will of course brilliantly be titled, "The Primate Directive."

Considering how prevalent it's become in the art you see everywhere on the internet -- including the hated Here's Two Things genre that has fueled the mindless engine of destruction that is online t-shirt sales -- it's always tempting to say that we've had enough of minimalist, graphic-design inspired takes on pop culture. The thing is, when it's done well, it's always fantastic, and Komboh does it very, very well. Komboh, the collective term for artists Michael W. Mateyko and Hans B. Thiessen, have done an incredible job bringing their design sensibility to stuff like Star Trek, Doctor Who, and posters that promote reading, and they've even done a great job mashing up Adventure Time and The Legend of Zelda. Check out a few of my favorites below!

With its dramatic tale of time travel trauma, "City on the Edge of Forever" is widely considered one of the best episodes of the original Star Trek TV series, but what made it to the screen was quite different from sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison's original script, which was too long for a one-hour TV show and had far too many speaking parts for the production budget. Comics don't have thos

The comic book, animation, illustration, pinup, mashup, fan art and design communities are generating amazing artwork of myriad styles and tastes, all of which ends up on the Internet and filtered into ComicsAlliance’s Best Art Ever (This Week). These images convey senses of mood and character — not to mention artistic skill — but comic books are specifically a medium of sequential narratives, and great sequential art has to be both beautiful (totally subjective!) and clear in its storytelling (not so subjective!). The words and the pictures need to work together to tell the story and create whatever tone, emotion and indeed world the story requires. The contributions of every person on a creative team, from the writer to the artist(s) to the letterers, are necessary to achieving a great page of sequential storytelling. It is this special nature of comic books that we’re celebrating in the recurring feature: Best Sequential Art Ever (This Week).

Much like their (rightly) acclaimed Judge Dredd comics, IDW's handling of the Star Trek license has managed to exceed reader expectations with high production values and an uncanny ability to tell engaging comics stories within the limitations of a tie-in book. Over the last three years, IDW has shifted the comics focus to tell stories from within the world of J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot team's