At last, a new John Byrne Star Trek comic!

One of the best things IDW has done in their time doing Star Trek comics is get John Byrne writing and drawing Trek. His series have been some of the most creative, engaging, and story dense books IDW have produced, exploring corners of the Trekverse rarely glimpsed (the Romulans, Gary Seven, Number One, and Doctor McCoy's lost years), and doing so with incredible visual flare; Byrne really knows how to lead a comic reader around the page! So it was pretty sad a couple of years ago when three years of near constant Byrne Star Trek releases came to an end. Byrne has been busy working on other projects with IDW, but at last he returning to the Trekverse, albeit in a very unusual way.

A few months ago Byrne started posting samples from something he was playing with on his forums, making new photo-comics using screencaps from TOS episodes. Initially he was doing straight retellings of episodes, but quickly landing on the idea of producing a lost episode, using combinations of existing shots, as well as building new scenes by compositing different elements together. Today Byrne announced that CBS and IDW have approved this project for publication, expected some time in 2014.

Here are the most recent iterations of the pages Byrne has so far previewed on his forum - Not necessarily the final versions of the pages. In a story called Strange New Worlds, the crew of the Enterprise return to Delta Vega to find a lost crew-mate. Byrne hasn't posted with dialogue for all pages, so not to spoil what he's up to (preview continues after the jump):

You can see many more images reading back through the posts on John Byrne's forum; it's quite interesting to see how this project has developed over the past few months. Also quite funny to see Byrne's trekkieness in action, here's a comment he made about his own ability to find all the necessary shots:

One of the things I have been noticing, and finding a tiny bit disturbing, is that when I think "Here I need a shot of Kirk doing. . . " I can almost instantly think of the scene. Usually I hear the dialog first, in my head, and this leads me to the pictures I need. And to my great surprise, sometime I even find myself going into the Third Season!!

If you managed to miss Byrne's previous Trek comics, just weeks ago IDW published an omnibus of every series he's done so far! Well worth picking up.