IDW on DS9, Voyager, Enterprise and "Quadcovers"

Andrew Steven Harris has made a rather informative post on the TrekBBS about the considerations IDW has for expanding their license outside of TOS and TNG. In short, something with at least a bit of DS9 could be upon us by the end of the year, Voyager is unlikely but might happen someday and Enterprise is very unlikely indeed thanks to some likeness approval issues. And in full, have yourself a full length quote!:

I'd really, really like to see what we could do with a Deep Space Nine license; and we might, might be testing the waters soon. Don't get too excited just yet, it won't be anything devastatingly major, and it won't be until later in 2008 at the earliest; but, it could definitely lead to something.

The Voyager license is a bit trickier--the ship made it back from the DQ, and many of the crew have since spread themselves across various corners of the Trek universe. And, once the ship made it back home, stories set in the DQ lose a certain amount of their dramatic tension; you'd end up with an entire license that feels like a flashback. Still, I'd be open to possibilities, if a couple of really good ideas came across our desk, but to be honest it's probably more realistic to expect that we won't be doing Voyager soon.

A license for Enterprise, however, is for certain extremely unlikely--largely because of actor likeness approval issues. Though I won't go into any specifics, when you'd need an actor's approval for every single panel on every single page that a particular character would appear in, the logistics of producing a monthly comic book series become exceptionally difficult, and probably not worth the care-and-feeding that all of it would require. Besides, though Enterprise definitely deserved more viewers than it got (particularly near the end), it's probably the license least likely to attract readers, so it'd probably be a better use of our time to focus our attention on a more popular license like DS9.

In the same thread Mr Harris also explained exactly what the quadcover format, being launched with the first issue of the New Frontier series, is:

Quad Covers(TM) are really simple. It's four different covers bound onto the same issue. Ever see a misprint double-cover, in which two covers accidentally got stapled onto a single book?

This is exactly the same thing. Except it's four covers. And it's deliberate. And all four covers are different.

Why? Because we wanted to give people four different covers without the impression that we were trying to force them into buying four different issues. So, instead, all four covers on the same issue.

With the Quad Cover, though, we can get a lot more creative than simply having four covers stapled on top of each other. For example, the covers could be like four sequential full-page splash panels, depicting not just a moment from inside the book, but an entire sequence-- all as the "cover". For our Transformers books, we could show one of the 'bots transforming from one mode to another across four different "covers". And so on.

And why not join in the discussion yourself, at the original post, here.