Star Trek Voyager Homecoming #1: Not a Homecoming

Voyager’s crew doesn’t get much time to savor their return to Earth before thieves whisk them away on another adventure in Star Trek Voyager Homecoming #1. The issue opens with an extended personal log entry from Captain Janeway as she recounts, in very broad strokes, Voyager’s seven year journey, taking the reader to the moments shortly following the show’s series finale. Unfortunately, this log entry sets the tone for the entire issue in the sense that it doesn’t reveal much about Janeway’s feelings of the occasion. The rest of the issue follows suit, rushing through the plot and spending almost no time on the crew’s feelings about getting home (or getting home and then being pulled away from it).

The thieves’ true identity is a total surprise. The writers don’t drop any hints before the reveal late in the issue. But the enemy is an original Voyager antagonist. And the story developed so fast that there wasn’t time for anyone else to come aboard the ship. If nothing else, this is a truly Voyager centric story.

The writers don’t explore what returning to Earth means for any of the characters in Star Trek Voyager Homecoming #1, but they do capture their personalities as established by the television series very well. The two highlights are B’Elanna and the Doctor as they work to unravel the mystery of who the thieves are and what they’re doing. B’Elanna in particular is fun. With the television series not having gone beyond her giving birth, the writers have free reign to tackle the character in these moments.

Hernández absolutely nails the characters’ likenesses from the television show. It’s easy to connect to everyone as a result. The close likenesses also makes reading emotions on their faces fairly easy. The level of detail on characters even in a medium closeup is significant. In a panel-filling closeup it is quite high. As a result, Hernández can communicate a great deal through even minor changes in facial expression. This is especially useful in the case of the Doctor who shoulders a lot of the exposition in Star Trek Voyager Homecoming #1. His expressions aren’t static. Indeed, Hernández repeatedly captures both the superior self-important attitude and wide-eyed shock that Robert Picardo brought to the character.

This facility with character expression and movement, and thus the ability to effectively communicate subtext, helps maintain the issue’s tension. While the mystery of who stole Voyager does drive the narrative, the issue is almost entirely advanced through dialogue with the barest of action only coming in the final pages. Hernández keeps the characters engaging even as they do nothing but have conversations.

Kirchoff’s color palette for the issue is bright but not overly so. He captures the feel of Voyager’s interior and, like Hernández’s depiction of them, keeps the characters’ coloring as consistent as possible with their on-screen appearance. As with Hernández’s art, Kirchoff makes this world an easy one to slip back into.

Star Trek Voyager Homecoming #1 is a very text heavy issue right from the start, and as the investigation into the ship’s thieves ratchets up in the latter half of the issue, it only gets heavier. Uyetake does a superb job keeping dialogue bubbles and caption boxes well organized. They are as out of the way of the art as possible, and easy to follow in conversations.