Year Four, Issue 1 review

Relief. After the mess of the last issue of The Space Between and general litter of plot holes throughout the series I was highly concerned about the ability of the writer David Tischman to actually write a coherent story. Well I'm glad to say he's done it with the first issue of Year Four, no plot holes, no jumps that make you flip back to check you haven’t missed a page just a nicely formed story with the usual Tischman mastery of characters and interesting story ideas, plus a nice assortment of general Star Trek references. The story does go a bit quickly which would be my only real criticism of it and as some of the pages are quite sparten you feel a bit more story could have been squeezed into the 22 pages, but it works none the less.

The story is delightful TOS, lone scientist, pretty girl, up to no good to help the one he loves, tragic end. I really could imagine this as an episode of the series

Looks a little Gold Key

Steve Conley's art isn't as strong a the rest of IDWs comic so far but it's not bad. It reminds me a lot of the art in the original gold key comics and I suspect that was the intent. Which works sometimes and not other, the character likenesses are a bit funny at times, you can tell who they are but they don't look quite right. The whole work is quite flat often using a nothing but a bold colour as a background and not being to generous with details. Compared to the short comic in the preceding in the Focus on... Star Trek book I think I prefer the more detailed look in that short story, but this issue is still pretty good looking. There were two pages I didn't really enjoy art wise which consisted of eight near identical panels of Dr McCoy and guest star chatting, the text was interesting but it was quite boring to look at the same thing again and again for two whole pages.

Could be a bit more exciting to look at...

So all in all a good effort, nice story if a little fast to conclude, and nice art if lacking in a bit of detail. I look forward to the next issue and my faith in David Tischman is growing at last.

And nice to see Arex and M'Ress in a comic, they should totally do Caitain and Triexian Alien Spotlight comics.