IDW announce new TOS: Year Five series, plus other comics updates

Lots of Star Trek comics updates today, starting with the announcement of a new series!

The Hollywood Reporter reports this April will bring us Star Trek: Year Five, the latest take on the final year of the the original TOS five-year-mission. They describe it as focusing on the crew as they near the end of their mission:

As Starfleet’s flagship returns home, the series will investigate how each member of the iconic crew feels about the uncertain future that awaits them as they reach Earth.

There's more detail below, but first, check out this gorgeous cover art for the series, by Greg Hildebrandt:

Writer Jackson Lanzing explained the series in more detail:

[The series will be] a vital, hard-hitting, character-focused look at Captain Kirk on his last year in command. [Kirk’s actions in the series] will have huge ripple effects, from the outbreak of war in the Alpha Quadrant to an unprecedented strain of trust with Spock. We’ll turn a mirror on modern society, just as [the original television series] did in the 1960s, and go boldly towards meaningful, heartfelt stories.

And fellow writer Collin Kelly described:

With Year Five, we don’t just want to thrill — we want to channel the power of [franchise creator Gene] Roddenberry’s original vision, to tell a story about the future that illuminates our present.

Lanzin and Kelly will be writing an opening story arc in the series, which will be illustrated by Stephen Thompson. But the series will also see stories from Brandon Easton, Jodi Houser, and Jim McCann, in what is described in the announcement as a writer's room, led it seems by Kelly and Lanzing, who are the showrunners (according to a tweet from the latter), under editors Denton J. Tipton, Chase W. Marotz, and Anni Perheenupta.

THR say the series has "a beginning, a game-changing middle, and a definite end" but also describe it as an "extended storyline", and with so much talent involved I'm wondering if this might be set to run a bit longer than IDW's usual 5-6 miniseries. I'm sure more details will follow shortly.

This isn't the first time the final mission of the Enterprise has been explored in tie-in media, there have been several comics and novels offering takes on the hows and whys of what brought the crew home, including IDW's own Mission's End in 2009! And if you're wondering what happened in Year Four; well IDW have tackled that before too, in two miniseries from 2007 and 2008, Year Four, and Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment.


Meanwhile, in other corners of the Trek-verse, several new covers for forthcoming Star Trek comics have now been released. Here's an exciting J.K. Woodward cover for the soon to be released Picard/Stargazer one shot in IDW's 20th anniversary 20/20 series (also sporting a shiny new 20th anniversary logo). The book is also illustrated by Woodward, and written by no less than Peter David!

And we've also got the A and B covers, both by David Messina, for the first issue of the mega-crossover event The Q Conflict, which will be bring together TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager! This series is also due to start very soon, and from the looks of these covers Q's conflict may well involve the Organians too.

Finally we've got some little art teases from Daniel Irizarri, who is working on a TNG story in the next Waypoint anthology (due in March):

To keep track of all the latest Star Trek comic releases, hit the comics button on my 2019 schedule page. You can also find reading lists for several Star Trek comic series on my Trek Collective Lists site.