IDW Publishing recently wrapped up a monumental era of the Star Trek publishing line with the Lore War crossover, which capped off Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing’s multi-year run on the flagship Star Trek series. But that’s hardly the end of IDW’s Star Trek line. The company is in the midst of launching no fewer than four new Star Trek books, each set in a different era of the franchise timeline and focusing on a different cast of characters.
Among these new titles is Kelly and Lanzing’s Star Trek: The Last Starship, a book that resurrects Captain James T. Kirk in the bleak 31st Century era known as The Burn. There’s also Star Trek: Red Shirts, a TOS-era book about those unluckiest of Starfleet members. The lineup is rounded out by two series spinning directly out of the events of the Star Trek shows, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Seeds of Salvation and Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming.
To get a better idea of what’s coming for this ambitious Star Trek relaunch, IGN spoke with group editor Heather Antos and the writers of all four titles - Kelly, Lanzing, Red Shirts’ Christopher Cantwell, The Seeds of Salvation’s Robbie Thompson, and Homecoming’s Susan and Tilly Bridges. Read on to learn more about these new stories and why there’s going to be a Trek comic for fans of all types this summer.
Making Star Trek’s 60 Years of Continuity Accessible
The Star Trek franchise is about to celebrate its 60th birthday soon. At this point, the Trek timeline is one of the most sprawling in all of popular culture, comprising numerous shows, over a dozen films, and countless comics, novels, and video games. It’s enough to wonder how a newcomer is supposed to dive into the massive universe nowadays. But the writers make it clear that each book is designed with accessibility firmly in mind, whether it’s telling a standalone story with a new cast (like The Last Starship and Red Shirts) or building directly on one of the Trek shows (like The Seeds of Salvation and Homecoming).
“One of the neat things [about The Last Starship] is we are separating ourselves by time so much from the Star Trek that people know,” Kelly tells IGN. “We're able to approach these things from a fresh perspective and assume that you don't have all these years of context, because frankly, our characters don't necessarily have all these years of context. So we are very specifically trying to lens in on bringing in, if you are a fan of science fiction in general, if you love Battlestar Galactica, come play with us, right, because that's the broader scope that we're really hoping to welcome to Star Trek so then they can all fall in love with combadges and meeps.”
“We're able to approach these things from a fresh perspective and assume that you don't have all these years of context, because frankly, our characters don't necessarily have all these years of context."“I would say that the level of entry for something like Star Trek: Red Shirts, it's niche but also low, because I think you can understand the concept very quickly, which is all of these characters are expendable and you're going to watch a lot of people get hurt and be killed over the next five issues,” Cantwell says. “But at the same time, it's something that we want to make sure it conforms and fits in for the most ardent fans.”
Even with Voyager: Homecoming, a book whose entire selling-point is that it explores what happens immediately after the finale of the TV series, the goal is accessibility. Tilly Bridges explains that the first issue is designed to catch new readers up to speed with the cast and their yearslong odyssey.
“[It’s] giving Voyager fans maybe what they'd been hoping for from the finale, because I really like that finale, but you never actually get to see them get home, and that hurts,” Tilly Bridges says. “So we want to give them that and we want to give the crew one last adventure together, but you also want it to be accessible to people that have never seen Voyager. Maybe say, ‘This is why these characters are so amazing. Go check out that show.’ So I think, hopefully, we hit the balance of recapping everything that you need to go through with it. And then if you're brand new to Star Trek or Voyager, you're just going to get a really exciting sci-fi adventure story and hopefully it'll get you into Trek because Trek's amazing.”
Antos sums up the mission statement of the revamped Star Trek line this way - it’s all about going boldly forward and telling stories Trek fans have never seen before.
“It's really about branching out and taking the Star Trek mission statement of exploring strange new worlds and doing things in the comics that we've never seen done before,” Antos says. “That has been the mission with every single one of these books. I don't want to make the same Star Trek comics that we've gotten the previous 60 years. I want to be going bold. I want to be doing new things, and each and every single one of these captains of their own stories here have taken that mission full steam ahead.”
Lanzing adds, “Star Trek comics have been so many things over the years, but they've never been a little bit of DS9, a little bit of TNG, a little bit of TOS, some of The Motion Picture. My favorite stuff from Voyager, my favorite stuff from Discovery. Lower Decks is there too. We've never had this before. This is a brand new frontier, no pun intended, really, of Star Trek comics because for the first time it's treated like a shared, living comic book universe rather than an adaptation of an IP. And so as we talk about bringing in comic book fans, I think Heather's biggest innovation, and one that we very much enjoyed the freedom of, is treating this like it's all one IP, like it's all one universe, like it's all one story, not a bunch of scattershot individual series that were presented over a long period of time.”
Star Trek: Red Shirts
Of the four books, Red Shirts might have the simplest and most engaging elevator pitch. As the title suggests, it’s all about the hapless Starfleet security officers who are always the first to fall on away missions. The book brings together a wide cast of newly created characters who share one thing in common - each and every one of them has the potential to die before the series ends. As the recently released first issue shows, Red Shirts is wasting no time in racking up a body count.
“Whether or not you know anything about James T. Kirk or Captain Picard or that Janeway prefers her coffee hot and black, you've heard of Red Shirts,” Antos says. “Red Shirts are the memeification of Star Trek in the broader spectrum and you know that to be a Red Shirt means you die in a probably terrible fashion, and I thought that was such a great entry level that we could do a really cool action or kind of greedy, darker Star Trek story that we've not quite seen Star Trek approach quite yet.”
Having a cast of new characters certainly helps in terms of accessibility, but it also creates its own storytelling challenges. How do you introduce the large ensemble cast quickly and efficiently and ensure readers will connect with them, even as they start dropping like flies?
“That was where I think working with Heather and then also Cassandra [Jones], one of our other editors on the books, we came up with the idea of introducing that crew manifest. And the crew manifest, it's not overly written, but it helps you with a snapshot of each person and it's borrowing a little bit from even back in, I think, the ‘90s when X-Men rosters started to get huge and the teams are breaking into blue and gold and this and that, and you're like, ‘Wait a minute, who's what?’ And then Hickman took that further where it's like, ‘Okay, hold on. Stop the story and we're going to tell you.’ And it helps a little bit, right? Because it's monthly, it's not daily, it's not weekly like a television show so that crew manifest really helps.”
Cantwell continues, “And then just giving them kind of little crystallized moments in that first issue so that you can hit little notes. And I know that Chip Miller has a peanut allergy, but I don't think we discussed that in the story ever, but you know he has a peanut allergy, so it's there. The peanut allergy becomes subtext, is what I'm saying, and that is the wonder of the storytelling that we get to do.”
Cantwell expects that readers will grow more and more attached to these new characters as the book unfolds, making it all the more difficult when the final issues arrive and only a handful of security officers are left standing.
“You start with the concept and you go, ‘That's hilarious,’" Cantwell says. “And I think that there's some deaths in it, especially in the first issue, and some that are unexpected or shocking, and still they're very much in the vein of someone being turned into a mineral cube and crushed, which is how our red shirts died in the original series. It's like we're doing that, but I think that they hit harder and harder and harder as the issues go on, especially when you get to the last people standing and you've been with them and you're rooting for them to make it that.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Seeds of Salvation
Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation is exactly what it sounds like - a spinoff of the Paramount+ series. Set between the third and fourth seasons of the show, The Seeds of Salvation focuses on a handful of characters like First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Security Officer La'An Noonien-Singh, Science Officer Spock, and Nurse Christine Chapel as they’re called to a remote, icy world and encounter the horrors lurking within.
What makes this series especially interesting is that Thompson is also a writer for Strange New Worlds Season 4. We were curious how different the experience is writing these characters for TV as opposed to comics. As he reveals, it’s mostly a question of scale.
“The only difference really is sometimes the scale, but that works both ways because there's certain things that, at least in my opinion, you can only really do in a comic,” Thompson says. “A comic operates just in a different way. It's those moments between those moments. Like in Chris's book, it's very much reminiscent to me of what Ostrander did in the Suicide Squad. It was great seeing characters getting killed off, but it was those scenes in the break room that really make you give a s*** about these characters? And I think that's one of the really fun things about working with this group of people is everybody wants to handcraft these tales.”
In this case, the advantage of the comic book medium is that it allows Thompson and artist Travis Mercer to craft a Trek tale that would be very difficult and costly to produce in live-action.
“This was something that I certainly would love to do in the live action version, but it is prohibitively expensive and there are certain realities in production that just boil down to just the laws of space and time that I can't bend,” Thompson says. And so to be able to have Pelia's character show up for a panel is something that I simply can't do on the live action version of it. To be able to have the full cast available at all times, to be able to work on the scale of something that's, as Heather pointed out, Lovecraftian is pretty challenging to do. I mean, I think we do feature quality work on the show, but we're limited by space and time and all those things. And that's one of the things I think that's really unique about comics is that it really can break down that space and time in ways that are both practical and for the story as well.”
Antos adds, “You pitched me, I think, three or four different ideas off the top. And yeah, this was the pitch where I'm like, ‘This is it. There's no sending any other pitch.’ Personally, selfishly, because I'm all for deep sea horror and I've been begging for anyone to pitch me a deep sea horror book for years pre-Star Trek. But also, to me, the ocean is just as equally vast and scary as space is, and it's right here on our planet and this crew is off on a brand new planet but just think of the horrors that are underneath us or in the ocean and make them Lovecraftian space monster size and it makes for pretty tense circumstances for our crew.”
Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming
Star Trek: Voyager’s final episode has always been a bit controversial among fans. While the series ends on a happy note, ultimately bringing Captain Janeway and her crew back to the Alpha Quadrant, we never get to see what happens next. The series wraps with that final shot of Voyager orbiting Earth.
But at long last, fans are getting the added closure they’ve been craving. Voyager: Homecoming picks up exactly where the show left off, seizing the opportunity to explore the many happy reunions while also introducing one final challenge for Janeway and the gang to overcome. As readers will see when the first issue arrives, the series builds directly on some loose ends from the show.
“There were so many different threads you could pull on and be like, ‘Well, you know, Voyager did get home, but also left all of these dangling plug threads out there.’” says Susan Bridges. “So that was definitely something we wanted to hit on in the pitch and be like, who from their past might be fun to play with?”
Tilly Bridges adds, “That was something that we worked on with Heather and Paramount - figuring out who is the right foil for this story. What worked within the comics and within the broader Star Trek universe and what didn't and what was the best choice. But I think what we ended on was a very Voyager choice, so it's going to feel very much like this is part of Voyager to the readers, I think.
Janeway has taken on a second life post-Voyager, with actress Kate Mulgrew reprising the role in projects like the movie Star Trek: Nemesis and the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy. But the other Voyager crew members haven’t necessarily been so lucky. We asked the writers which characters they were most eager to reconnect with in this sequel.
“Personally, I am such a big Tuvok fan, so I was so excited to see Tuvok come home,” says Susan Bridges. “I feel like Tuvok is such an interesting Vulcan and especially with his history with Janeway that's been dropped several times throughout the series and also his family. He has children and I just feel like he's just a really interesting Vulcan. So I mean, I do love Vulcans, all of them, but I was very excited to give some fun family stuff for Tuvok.”
“I think one of the more interesting characters for me to think about in terms of the reunion and coming home is the Doctor, because he doesn't have anyone to come back to, but he's become a fully sentient, self-realized person on the journey,” says Tilly Bridges. “And so what does that look like for him? All of these people are reuniting, but they're his family and now he's maybe going to lose them. He doesn't know where they're going to go or what's going to happen so it's a very different experience for him than it is for the rest of the crew, I think.”
Antos adds, “And for me, I mean it's obviously the burning question of does Harry Kim finally get his promotion when he gets back home planetside? What did we joke on a Paramount meeting this week? Harry's promotion actually did come up and will they, won't they? And I decided that Mirror Universe Harry Kim is actually the Federation president. The ultimate promotion.”
Star Trek: The Last Starship
The Last Starship might just be the most exciting of these new Trek books, both because it’s Lanzing and Kelly’s follow-up to their previous acclaimed run and because it explores a giant blank canvas in the Star Trek universe. While the live-action series Star Trek Discovery introduced the concept of the Burn, a galaxy-wide disaster where a mass dilithium explosion kills trillions of beings and cripples the Federation, it didn’t show us the immediate aftermath of that disaster. That’s where The Last Starship comes in. The book focuses on a new character named Captain Sato as he leads a crew of the last remaining starship in the Federation fleet. Together, they’ll fight to keep hope alive in the darkest of times.
“The roots of The Last Starship go almost back to the beginning of our time on Flagship, which is what we sort of internally call [our Star Trek run] because it's very hard to call it Star Trek when you're talking to so many great Star Trek writers,” Lanzing says. “Flagship was just getting kicked off. And between Heather and Risa, who's one of our licensing partners and a lot of people who we're all talking about Star Trek, we're talking about what could this be? How could we push it? Where could it go? What could it be? What does a book look like for Star Trek that feels fundamentally unlike Star Trek, which was so the opposite question of what we were asking on Flagship, which was how do you do a book that feels as much like Star Trek as you possibly can?”
If all great science fiction is about using the trappings of the future to provide commentary on the present, then The Last Starship is very much in that vein. It’s probably the perfect Trek story for 2025.
“This is us writing our fears,” Lanzing says. “This is about what it's like to live in a society that is falling apart, where injustice seems to be winning over justice every day, and when everyone in that society is being challenged to live up to the ideals that they thought were inherent, that they thought were endemic. That story I can give to anybody. You don't need to be a Star Trek fan. You just need to look outside your window and be looking for a story that talks about what's going on all over the world right now.”
So much of The Last Starship is built around new elements - a new starship, a new crew, an era we’ve only begun to comprehend. But it does have one critical anchor tying it back to the classic Trek era - Captain James T. Kirk.
“Once we figured that out, we're going to give you a book that feels fundamentally new starship - new cast, new time period, new technology, new problem, certainly a new setting in many respects,” Lanzing says. “And then we're going to take one of the most, if not the most iconic single characters in Star Trek - one of, I would say, a handful, maybe five, that you could put up on a screen anywhere in the world and they might get known. What does it look like to make Captain James T. Kirk suffer through the Burn? What is that journey for that man? And that was such an incredible question for us, such a great way to re-approach this character that we started on with Star Trek back in Year Five and such a great way for us to use everything we've learned on Star Trek all these years as fans, but also as the writers to tell as relevant and approachable story as possible.”
That being said, fans shouldn’t necessarily assume they know how Kirk’s story will play out in this book. For once, he’s not the man in the captain’s chair calling the shots. He’s a piece of a much larger puzzle.
“Along the lines of what Chris is doing over in Red Shirts is, to make it clear, we have an entire cast of new characters that we have also really fallen in love with, but yes, we are unfortunately going to brutalize because that is the nature of dynamic, delicious storytelling,” Kelly says. “Kirk is a part of that stew, but this is not the James T. Kirk that we know and love. I'm just saying this is a different flavor, right? This is not a man in command of his own ship. This is a man who is here now, and I can already feel the Trek sniper target on my head. So let's just say whatever you think it is, whatever you fear it may be, it is neither of those things. As a Star Trek fan, first and foremost, what I can tell you is it's very cool.”
Lanzing adds, “We are very cautious about this move. This move was one of those things that in a lot of ways felt like it could betray the book because the whole point of the book is to make something approachable and new and here we are putting this giant piece of continuity in the center of it. Ultimately, I think what's been really beautiful about it in execution, what I can tell you now having written many issues of the book, is that he fits right in. Not because he fits into the time period or fits into the cast, but because the story needs a person like him, it needs a person who can feel the centuries of heartbreak on this thing and not simply the heartbreak that's happening here. So how he comes about, who exactly he is, how that all functions, that is very much a question for the book and I can't wait for people to see that.”
Star Trek: Red Shirts #1 is available in comic shops now. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Seeds of Salvation #1 and Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming #1 will follow in August 2025, with Star Trek: The Last Starship #1 hitting in September 2025.
For more, see Shatner reflect on his own mortality and find out how many seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds remain.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
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