IDW continues to explore new and established frontiers in their Star Trek comics line, and their latest announcement points to more of the latter — Star Trek: The Motion Picture–Echos will follow the original crew in the immediate aftermath of the first Star Trek film.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters way back in 1979, and its place in history stands as being the first Star Trek film and immediately proceeding the much more loved Wrath of Khan. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what the story was about, but it sounds like writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Oleg Chudakov thankfully have a better memory than I do.
“Despite watching the occasional fragment of a Star Trek episode here and there with my father, my true introduction was going to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture with my grandparents—I was entranced. I’m thrilled that IDW and Paramount Global have allowed me to revisit that time period, which was so impactful to me and my love of Star Trek,” Guggenheim said. “Almost all Trek stories are told from the point of view of the Enterprise crew, but I was interested in telling a story from the perspective of an outsider as a means of recapturing how it felt for me when I first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
Here’s what to expect of Echoes:
… Echoes pits the venerated Captain James T. Kirk and his crew against enemies both terrifying and shockingly familiar! When a space anomaly thrusts a criminal mastermind—pursued by a very determined pilot on a mission—into our universe, the Enterprise must stop them from unintentionally starting a war with the Romulans and unleashing a superweapon of foreign technology into the system. But things get infinitely more complicated when these newcomers to our reality remove their helmets, revealing that they’re doppelgängers of our beloved heroes!
“When everything in life feels like it’s moving too fast towards the future, it’s always important to step back and revisit where it all came from. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with this comic focusing on the Star Trek: The Motion Picture time frame,” said series editor Heather Antos. “No one knows more about this period in Trek history than Guggenheim, we’ve learned…and we could think of no one better suited to take Captain Kirk and his crew on this wild adventure. Paired with Chudakov’s energetic, character-driven inks, this is one mission that the crew of the Enterprise soon won’t forget. Oh, and did we mention that there are possible easter eggs to some of our other Trek books, too?”
In addition to drawing the interiors, Chudakov also drew the second cover for the book:
And then you’ve got the variant covers, by Luke Sparrow and Rod Reis:
Look for the first issue of five in May.