Eaglemoss launches Star Trek comics collection

Eaglemoss, publishers of Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, are moving into another area of the Star Trek universe with the launch of Star Trek: The Graphic Novel Collection. The fortnightly series will deliver a hardcover editions of comics drawn from the entire fifty year history of Star Trek comic publishing. The books will feature spine-art building up a single image, plus new introductory texts:

With this collection you can revisit all the classic characters and incredible art from the STAR TREK comic archives. Every edition has a specially-commissioned introduction to provide context to the story. Every book contains a number of collected comics and a bonus reprint of one of the comic archive’s classic stories.

I expect that description, from their website, indicates this Star Trek collection will follow a similar format to Eaglemoss' DC collection, in which each issue includes a big multi-issue story, plus an extra issue drawn from somewhere else in the comic series. That would certainly be a pretty good way to delivery the many single issue Star Trek comics, while also giving each book a big story to focus on.

Eaglemoss' website for the series currently list four issues, and it seems initially at least they are going to be mining IDW's catalogue, with Countdown, The City on the Edge of Forever, Hive, and Spock: Reflections first in line.

There is the promise of pulling stories from much wider sources however, with the website laying out (almost) all the previous Star Trek comic publishers (the very minor ones are missing, and more conspicuously, so are the US comic strips).

With near continuous publication of Star Trek comics almost as long as the series has existed, there is a huge wealth of stories for Eaglemoss to choose from here; many hundreds of books. It will be quite interesting to see if they really dig into that resource, or just focus on the handful of titles which seem to get reprinted again and again.

If you opt to subscribe to the series from Eaglemoss directly, Eaglemoss offer some subscription extras: A set of bookends, a set of movie posters in a tin, a lapel pin, and tin-plate comic cover prints.

Additionally there is a premium subscription, where for an extra pound a go you will receive occasional extra books, reprints of the various Star Trek crossover comic series. Listed are the Planet of the Apes crossover The Primate Directive, the Doctor Who adventure Assimilation², and the Legion of Super-Heroes crossover.

At the moment the series is only available in the UK, and in fact I suspect not even everywhere here. It is not unusual for part-work publishers to launch a limited test run of a series (in a small geographical area, and in this case online too), before committing to go for it all out. As I've yet to see much publicity for this series at all, I believe that may be the case here. Although that is wholly speculation on my part. That is the model the starship collection followed, about a year after the trial run the series restarted across the UK, and then gradually expanded to other territories - So don'd despair if you're not British, it might yet be coming your way.

There is potential for this series to run and run with so much material to draw from, let's hope Eaglemoss pick some good titles to make it worthwhile. If you're interested in subscribing, you can find all the details on the website for the collection.