Star Trek is currently undergoing a renaissance not only on television, but in the comics as well. Last fall, IDW Publishing, which has held the rights to produce Star Trek comics since 2007, revitalized the line to great acclaim. This culminated not only in Day of Blood, the franchise’s first ever comics' crossover, but also two Eisner Award nominations.
This rebirth began in Star Trek #400. The one-shot, featuring a variety of stories, seeded an epic storyline in which a mysterious and powerful force begins killing the universe’s god-like beings. The Bajoran Prophets return Ben Sisko to our reality to find the culprit. After assembling a crew culled from various iterations of the franchise, Sisko learns the Klingon Emperor Kahless II is behind the slaughter. Kahless not only wishes to kill the gods, as his namesake did, but also take their power for himself. His reign of terror explodes in the Star Trek: Free Comic Book Day Special, which lays the groundwork for the epic Day of Blood. Screen Rant sat down with Star Trek writers Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly and Senior Editor Heather Antos to discuss Day of Blood, and what comes next for Sisko and Worf.
SR: How is your Comic-Con going so far?
Jackson Lanzing: It’s been great. We had the Star Trek panel earlier. We got to announce some new stuff. We got to see some art for the next run of Star Trek, sort of post-Day of Blood, which has been a blast.
Collin Kelly: We've been working at our booth when we can, and the Star Trek fans are coming out of the woodwork
JL: Star Trek is the thing that sells at our booth, I'm learning, which is totally dope. That's always a great thing to see a person come over, and they just get enraptured by all of their favorite characters in these books. It's very exciting to see as long-term Star Trek fans ourselves.
Day of Blood Was a Massive Undertaking
SR: I feel like Star Trek is bigger than ever right now with all the different projects and especially in the realm of the comics. Can you describe the genesis of Day of Blood? So, how did this big event come about? And what kind of strings did you have to pull to make all of this happen?
JL: We'll talk about the creative origin, and then we can hear about the strings. As with a lot of things on the Star Trek line, it starts with Heather sending us a text, an email or calling us and asking us a question. Star Trek started by Heather getting in touch and being like, "Hey, what's a Star Trek book? What if you have no subtitles? What if you just called a book Star Trek? And what if it was an entire line? What does that look like?"
And that gave us the freedom to play and actually find this thing that we'd been wanting as fans our whole life, a book or even an entire line that treated Star Trek like a shared universe, like Marvel and DC Comics; we can do an Avengers-like title, but also let us do Dark Avengers or a Teen Titans book–all these different things that exist inside of Star Trek.
And once you do that, you're starting to talk in that language. I think the next conversation didn't take long. Day of Blood was part of the conversation from very early on, but it wasn't like we came in and said, "And at the end of the first year, there'll be an event." [Heather] came back at us and said, "Okay, can we tie this together into an event? Can we treat this the way that comics treat events?" And that led us start to build what Kahless and what Day of Blood became.
CK: We knew that [Captain Benjamin] Sisko was going to be anchoring our main core story. Sisko very much is a man who was torn between the challenges of faith and science. If a story was going to be revolving around the mystery of who is killing gods of the Star Trek universe, we knew that what we needed was a villain who could be on the opposite side of that. And for us, that was Kahless, who was introduced, or was rather brought back into the world during Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's a clone with all the memories and religious iconography of the original, but he hasn't had the capability or the chance to seize the power he once had. And that is that kind of passionate Klingon sense of honor that we wanted to absolutely explode as a metaphor for a lot of the demagoguery and challenges that we see in the modern world.
Heather Antos: Jackson and Collin said it perfectly. I literally called them and was like, "What does a book just called Star Trek look like?" And that came from a place of when I got the keys to the license, looking back at what Star Trek comics have been. And not to say that they were bad, or they weren't doing well or anything like that, but they were Star Trek comics that only Star Trek fans were buying. Star Trek has this vast history of being the first multiverse. It always confused me why comics fans weren't as invested or interested in Star Trek as they were in say like the MCU or Batman or anything like that. Star Trek laid the groundwork for all of these other multiverses to exist. And so I wanted to change that.
I wanted to change the format and change how we view the line and build a language that comics fans understand. And what comics fans want is they want to know that their books matter. And how does a book matter? Well, a book matters if it's going to affect anything else that happens in the line. And so we built a line. We built Defiant that spun out of Star Trek. We built this conflict, and like they said, the event was always the goal from number one. And it's not going to be our only one.
Day of Blood Is a Classic Event Comic
SR: With Day of Blood being the first big Star Trek comic event, do you have a list of the rules of event comics? Because event comics can be very, very good. Event comics can also completely kill fan interest. So I imagine there's a bit of a tightrope.
CK: Absolutely. We are fans first and foremost, so we have the pedigree of reading both the good and the bad. What we found the key here was communication. We are reading every script that Chris Cantwell, who's the writer of Star Trek: Defiant-
JL: And is our co-writer on everything on Day of Blood? We all broke it down together in a room physically. All of us were in a room breaking that story together. So everyone knew what was up from moment one.
CK: And through that communication, we were able to really keep everyone on the same page, to the point where sometimes we would argue. It's really important to make sure each of us are representing each other's characters correctly, because it can tell kind of one large story. And I think that was really one of the magic tricks we pulled off.
HA: I also want to be clear when they argue they said, "I don't know if I agree with that." And that was the extent of that.
JL: Conflict is actually really light because Chris comes from the same space we do. We were friends before we started this book. He came onto this line because when we were doing Star Trek: Year Five before Heather came on, and we were getting our feet wet on Star Trek. Chris was a fan of the book, and he would DM me on Twitter. We didn't know each other. He would DM me and be like, "Hey, how do I pitch Star Trek? I have a Janice Rand miniseries. How do I make this happen?" And I would be like, "You don't. There are actually a lot of problems with doing Janice Rand." But at the same time that he was doing that, I was watching Halt and Catch Fire. And I was like, "Halt and Catch Fire is one of my favorite things." We became fast friends over a mutual admiration society. And so when we had this opportunity to bring somebody else in, we were like, "It's got to be Chris because we know that we're already going to sync with him."
In terms of how we actually manage an event, I think the other thing that's really key is not putting plot first, which might seem insane for an event, because events are driven by plot. Something big happens in every event. In comic events, it's almost always the world that explodes, right? It's some big thing. Sorry. And we knew that we had that in Kahless making his move. He has been gathering power, he has been killing gods, not just because he wants them dead, but because he wants their power.
And as he has taken that power and weaponized it. He understands how to wield it and has returned to Kronos to take the power he thinks he deserves. And that kickoff, the coup that he pulls off in issue one–that's the plot. After that, everything else in Day of Blood is built on character, which is always sort of our thing in Star Trek. Frankly, it's kind of Collin and mine’s thing in every book. It's about the arcs and the characters and what they're going through. Here, it was a chance to say, "Okay, we have how many characters? 22 characters in this book or something?" Day of Blood has every Star Trek character on the board right now. We threw them all in here and then literally in that room said, "What's every single one of their arcs? What is Sisko's arc? What is Worf's arc? What is B'Elanna Torres arc?"
HA: That's literally the first thing we did on the board. We wrote, "Who's the cast? What are the interesting pairings that we and fans want to see, the interesting interactions of these characters? What makes sense? And then where do we have to end up? It's Google Maps, right?
JL: Yeah
HA: That's Google Maps. "Okay, here are all the different routes. Who's paying tolls and who's jumping across the city skylines?"
JL: And how do you use that to have characters grow and change? Because to me, event storylines tend to, I think, falter when they become an effort of plot mechanics and spectacle. Plot mechanics and spectacle are relatively easy. And frankly, plot mechanics can overburden a book very easily. If you know what the character's going through, if you know that the character's growing and changing, then the plot can be there, but the character's heart will take you through. And Star Trek's generally been really great about that. So-
HA: Events don’t matter if there’s no shift in status quo.
JL: Exactly. And that status quo can't just be the world; it has to be in the heart of the character. This event isn't just one that happens outside Sisko. This is the culmination of his arc in the first 12 issues of Star Trek. By the end of this arc, he's on a new arc, heading into the second year of Star Trek. Same thing with Worf.
Worf basically ends his arc here and then gets to embrace a new one moving forward. Everybody's going through a version of that. And it's not like everybody's going through their arc culminations here, but they're all plotted along the line so that the event matters. Not just because Kronos is under new leadership or because X ship blew up or whatever, but because the characters themselves have been fundamentally changed by the events.
Shaxs Almost Did Not Make It In
SR: That's such a smart approach and that's really evident. So with characters being such the central focus, were there any characters that you had a little bit more difficulty with mapping out and finding their place?
JL: There’s one legendary answer to that.
HA: There is one legendary answer to that.
JL: Shaxs. When Worf left, starting Star Trek Defiant, it left the tactical station open on the Theseus, and we wanted to make sure we gave ourselves a cool character there. So we used Shaxs from Star Trek: Lower Decks, a character who has an enormous amount of potential as a serious character, but is comedic by his very nature. And we love him–he's great. And he was so key to our second arc on Star Trek that just wrapped. And as we got into Day of Blood, we noticed everybody's got an arc–Shaxs is just a straight line. He's just fighting Klingons, and it's the best day ever. And we kept joking like, "Oh, it's just Shaxs' best day ever. He's just having a f*****g great day." And then Heather did her magic and lo and behold, suddenly Shaxs' Best Day Ever is a 30-page one-shot by Ryan North and Derek Charm.
HA: It's also on the editorial side, right? Day of Blood is very serious. It's very dark. There's massacre across the board, and we have to keep in mind, this is Star Trek. This is not a book about violence. We have action, but we're not gratuitous in what we show.
JL: Of course.
HA: But we can do cartoon violence. And boy, do we. And Ryan is just a master at capturing Mike McMahan's voice on those characters. And Derek Charm, who steps in for this book has a weird anime/manga style that is super, super fun. And yeah, I can't wait for people to see what we do.
CK: That being said though, though he is a straight line, we got to have him crash up against Ro Laren, who obviously has a very different kind of perspective. Getting these two to clash just by being in the same room together was absolutely delicious.
Star Trek is All About Character
SR: The Star Trek comics are doing a great job drawing parallels to real world events and politics. This feels very much like a modern take on these classic and beloved characters and concepts. So, how do you find a balance between making these parallels recognizable without them being totally overbearing, and it doesn't work without the parallel?
HA: Very carefully.
CK: Very carefully. I mean, once again, it's about these characters, looking at where they sit. Once you keep your eye on character first, then you can start looking at how those characters fit within a social context. Sometimes we have, especially in Year Five, when we did that with the room, we came in specifically on some of those issues saying, "We want to talk about this particular corner of the world right now. How do we do that through Star Trek"? This very much was, "We want to tell a story with these characters, and it mirrors and reflects the world around us in the rise of fascism, in the rise of massive upheaval."
HA: Yeah. I think there's never an editorial mandate of, "I want a book about Star Trek and fascism." That's not at all what happens. But like Colin and Jackson were saying, it's all about character first. It's all about their stories and their motivations. And me as an editor, I'm always checking, "Does this feel organic?" If this doesn't feel organic, if this feels like, "Oh, we're just doing this for plot, for the sake of whatever," I call that out. That's not going to happen.
JL: Well, one of the great things I think about working with Heather in general is that, and we've learned this through Valiant and now, is that there's a very no-BS policy, which I find extremely refreshing. Because when you're creating something, part of the way that Collin and I work is that we're just super blunt with each other, and if something's not working, we just say it. We're just open about that stuff and because of that, ideally, the stories get better because we are all a wet stone on which the story is being sharpened.
I think some people get really nervous, especially young writers, when they put stories forward, and they're told, "This isn't working." And they go, "Oh, well, I have to throw it all out and start again." Sometimes that is true, and sometimes burning it down and starting again is awesome. I wrote a whole essay about it once. But on the flip side of it, it's really, really valuable to know that you're in a room with people who, if 95% of it works, they will still tell you the 5% needs work and that you can sort of tie that in.
To answer your question though, I do want to note one thing. DC Fontana, Dorothy Fontana, who was one of the original writers of Star Trek. She was Gene's assistant effectively, and she ended up writing a good portion of the series. DC Fontana had this phrase that we came across in our research before we started Year Five.
There are these books called These Are the Voyages that have all the old memos between the entire production staff, that are hundreds of pages long, and they're literally like reading the Star Trek production emails. And DC Fontana has a thing that she constantly says in those emails or memos to various new writers. And she constantly says, "When thinking about Star Trek, the following is the most paramount: stories about ideas do not work, stories about characters do." You talk about that and people are like, "Oh, it's like Twilight Zone. It's like social storytelling." And sure it is. But any great episode of Star Trek: The Original Series is actually about character. The great thing about “City on the Edge of Forever” is not that it is a story about how we do or undo fascism, whether somebody rises because Edith Keeler dies, that's not the point.
The point is that Kirk has fallen in love and has to learn how to let go of a woman who he has fallen in love with and doesn't know how to do that. All the science fiction context of “City on the Edge of Forever” is not what makes that story work. It's the character. And we really try to just go back to that all the time. I feel like we're the “DC Fontana Boys.” We really just try to write the stories like she would because that's where the best of Star Trek came from.
The epic Star Trek: Day of Blood event, as well as the ongoing Star Trek and Star Trek: Defiant comic series are available now from IDW.