I always love my Trek, but there are times when I just cannot get enough of it. I’ve been listening to the scores, whistling Fred Steiner, watching Strange New Worlds, revisiting The Original Series, digging back into the novels, and it struck me… I haven’t really done much on the blog with the comics.

So I decided to read and write about the ones I could get my hands on. Some I still owe, some I’ve had since childhood, and some I’ve had to hunt down online, but it seemed like a fun way to explore the final frontier with old friends in stories that I don’t know so well, or at all.

So lets go back to the beginning, and have a look at the Gold Key comics. I have the Enterprise Log which was a compilation of some of the issues, and reading them now, I actually enjoyed them more than I did as a kid. Not everything works, and some of the designs aren’t great, but in its way, it is Star Trek.

Gold Key launched with the story, The Planet of No Return, which hit spinner racks in July 1967, and cost all of twelve cents. Damn. The story was written by Dick Wood and featured the art of Nevio Zeccara. I’ll say this, sometimes Zeccara had the looks of the actors down pat, and sometimes, well, the reader would just have to go with the assumption that who they were looking at was Captain Kirk, of Dr. McCoy. Spock always had pointy ears, so it was easy to pick him out.

It’s obviously a mistake in the series canon that it’s mentioned here that the Enterprise traverses galaxies, but they have, somehow, and they’ve arrived at a planet they refer to as Planet Kelly Green, or K.G.

While in orbit a strange spore infilitrates the ship and mutates one of the crew into a plant before the eyes of Spock and McCoy.

Leaving his chief science officer onboard, Kirk, Rand (who seems to be wearing a red cap over her beehive in the version I own), McCoy and a pair of red shirts (though they are all wearing these cool grey jumpers) beam down to the surface. And they do that by using a strange looking teleportation chamber instead of the transporter room we’re used to.

That just means that the artists and writers hadn’t seen enough of the show yet I guess. But they also say they are keeping in contact with radio and tv scanners. And instead of using hand communicators, the landing party seems to be using their tricorders. They are also outfitted with the usual hand phasers, and rather rifle-like phaser weapons.

I do like the character art, and you can usually tell who is who, though they will occasionally screw up the uniform colours. But some of the work is really exemplary, and looks great.

The plot includes some body horror elements that didn’t trouble me much as a kid, but this time out, really unnerved me a bit. We see from panel to panel, these spores infecting guinea pigs and humans, and transforming them into plants!

The dialogue is mostly horrible, with strange exclamations, and Kirk calls Rand ‘honey.’ Ugh. But the spirit of the show does feel like it’s there, even if the Enterprise’s nacelles seem to be acting as rockets. And there are some strange stardates, but those didn’t really come into line until TMP, so I won’t fault them for that.

Once on the planet, the investigation turns into a rescue when Rand is grabbed, and is going to be fed to giant carnivorous plants. A pinpoint phaser strike saves the day, but when the landing party is beamed up, Spock of all people insists that the planet’s flora be destroyed to stop it from spreading across the system. No quarantine, no future study. No scientific inquiry, just phaser it out of exitence.

Spock! I’m shocked! The Enterprise boldly continues it’s mission after that, and so will I as I explore issue number two next time, The Devil’s Isle of Space. Boldly go…