The second issue of Gold Key’s Star Trek comics hit spinners on June 1968. It once again featured Dick Wood as writer and Nevio Zaccara as the artist.

The story ends up being a familiar science fiction trope. The prison planet. The Enterprise arrives in an asteroid field, some of which are glowing. On them they find survivors of what they first assume are explorers. But soon, it’s revealed that they are prisoners.

What’s more they are awaiting execution. It seems all the asteroids are seismically unstable, and prone to exploding. They just don’t know when.

Arriving in this region of space, we see a fairly recognizable looking Enterprise bridge. But in the next panel, the starship looks more like the interior of a submarine with lots of weird equipment, like a 1950s science fiction movie. That includes an… infra-red telescope?

The Enterprise is caught up in an electromagnetic field surrounding the planet, and that means it’s time to investigate. Captain Kirk leads an exploration team (not a landing party) to the asteroid, beaming down from the still odd looking teleportation chamber.

When Kirk and his party are captured by the leader of the prisoners, Targu, he demands a negotiation with Spock. Targu and his men want off-planet before it blows. Will Spock comply?

Probably not, because he and Scotty (who does not look like any incarnation of Scot we’ve ever seen) have a plan. And after they rescue Kirk and his men, the Enterprise takes off with… rockets on full? And the asteroid blows with all the prisoners still there.

The alien design is fairly interesting. But for some reason, the Enterprise is using hand held mics and radio scanners to to their scanning and communication. Spock makes some weird exclamations like ‘shades of Pluto.’ He also seems to have a bit more of a sense of humour than he’s been known to have.

This is another story that I knew very well, it was in The Enterprise Log collection that I had. I haven’t read it in decades, and I really enjoyed it. Sure some of it isn’t great, but there is some Trek there. Sure the characters and designs aren’t always in line with the series, but it still feels like it could be related.

I get that the writers hadn’t seen much of the series to this point, and were probably working off pictures of the cast, and sets. I also understand that they wanted to fill the panel space with imagery that said science fiction to them, but wow, some of the panels, and rooms we see in the Enterprise seem really out of place.

The human adventure continues next week when the Enterprise encounters the Invasion of the City Builders!