Star Trek Year Five #12: Back to the Future

Woah!! This comic has more action than all the episodes of the original series combined! And just as much suspense. Picking up where the last issue left off, authors Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly kick this one off in high gear and don’t let you breathe until the very last page. It’s Kirk against time-traveler Gary Seven alone on the Enterprise and you know that neither of these guys is giving up until they come out on top. There are some really impressive action scenes this issue, which is sometimes hard to do, but they pull it off very nicely. Add to that some heavy sci-fi tech problems for some stranded members of the crew and this one is going to have you turning pages as quickly as you can. Lanzing & Kelly trick you into thinking this is a “one & done”, but you’ll come to find out that this is a chapter in a really, important story. In fact, you find out that this whole series has been leading up to what I think is going to be a great big movie-sized adventure for the crew of the Enterprise. Maybe for the whole planet Earth, even. Needless to say, in my opinion, this is a very well written comic.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, there’s also some bad news. The art in this book is by three different artists. Kieron McKeown, Silvia Califono, and Stephen Thompson split the art duties this issue, and it’s a case of “too many cooks in the kitchen”. They’re all very good artists in their own right, but the transfers of style don’t exactly flow from one to the other, in fact, it’s quite jarring when you go from one to the other. We don’t even get an even split. Like one artist takes the scenes on the Enterprise, the other takes the scenes on the planet, it’s just kind all over the place and I’ll admit it did take away a little bit from my enjoying the book. I wish the art would’ve been handled just a little bit better.