As of September 8th, 2021, the multimedia franchise known as Star Trek will reach its 55th anniversary. It’s been a bumpy ride, with works both fantastic and utterly miserable. We here at You Don’t Read Comics generally love the pop-culture juggernaut, and wanted to look at the corner of the franchise that mattered the most to us: the comic books. As the year rolls on, we hope to look at more aspects of the comic books the franchise has spawned, and to shed some light on the forgotten side-stories brought to us by those who would never see their work on the small or big screen.

Star Trek was a pop culture phenomenon almost immediately. Thanks to Gene Roddenberry and his love of making money off his creations, we almost immediately had cereal box tie ins…

...and even weird toys that certainly would not fit with anything in the show.

While most of the regular world didn’t think much of the science fiction series, it struck a chord with a lot of new fans with the mysterious Spock, the rough and tumble Kirk, the cantankerous McCoy, and a crew of supporting characters who were treated as humans rather than set dressing. Infamously, Nichelle Nichols was talked into remaining on the show as Uhura by Martin Luthor King Jr after a season of particularly dissatisfying episodes where she felt she was just the operator. Later episodes would give her a feeling of more importance, luckily, and fans would further flesh her out as the franchise expanded.

But none of that quite matters yet. You see, we’re looking at the first licensed Star Trek work in America. Those would belong to comic books published by Western Publishing… though there is a debate that MAD Magazine’s Star Blecch came first.

But we’re looking at official works, so MAD Magazine doesn’t get to count for the purposes of this article. Western Publishing owned several sub-companies, including Whitman Publishing and Gold Key Comics. The former would put out the first prose book for Star Trek in 1968 called Mission to Horatius, and would almost be completely cancelled for having offensive depictions of minority characters Sulu and Uhura, as well as being written as a bland and boring adventure. The former got fixed, but the story was still a glacial mess.

The comics, I’m going to be honest, were not much better at first.

The first issue was released in July of 1967, using nothing more than the story bible of Star Trek with rough sketches for the crew and their relationships. There would also be a few rough story ideas tossed in, and most of the Gold Key comic crew were given publicity promotional shots of the sets and cast of the show. Since Star Trek was still in its infancy, the level of care that the series got was completely bizarre compared to what we’re used to now. Actors look close enough to their real world counterparts in most circumstances, but you get some real weird examples of the creators not having seen the show.

The promotional shots would be partially at fault for this, as the “yellow” shirts we all know Kirk and other Operations officers like Sulu and Chekov wore were actually closer to lime green until they got under studio lighting. This is why those yellows always seem so off, and why Kirk is parading around in a bright green shirt.

It doesn’t explain why McCoy is wearing one as well, or why Kirk is referring to D-Hour.

The first issue is called The Planet of No Return, and has no credits. In fact, literally none of the issues from Gold Key contain credits, and all we have to go off of are interviews with Gold Key staff, so not every person is properly credited on Memory Alpha. It’s estimated that Dick Wood wrote this issue, while Nevio Zeccara provided the art.

The crew of the Enterprise is exploring Galaxy Alpha, a distant galaxy that has no life within it. It’s not like the second pilot of Star Trek dealt with how it’s impossible for people to leave the galaxy or anything. The crew beam up some vegetation from a nearby planet, with McCoy and Spock nearly getting killed by plants growing wildly from the samples. So the crew beams down to the planet in work clothes and Yeoman Janice Rand gets a red beanie in a hilarious coloring error that persists throughout the entire issue.

Eeh. Close enough.

Also, we have the first expanded universe death with Crewman Hunt turning into a tree for unexplained reasons. Even Spock realizes the greatness of Hunt will be missed.

As it turns out, the vegetation of the planet is alive, and are actually keeping mammals for food. It’s an interesting inversion of the standard that we expect as humans, and could be a fascinating examination into our biases and how to communicate with the unknown. Later Star Trek content would explore similar ideas, such as the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled Home Soil that features the crew trying to bargain and interact with a species of microscopic sentient crystals. With these comics obviously aimed at a younger audience, it would be perfect to teach kids the morals Star Trek is so often known for and-

Or Spock could just advocate to burn the entire planet to the ground, destroying all new and unknown life thereon. Sure! That’s perfectly within the realm of believably for Star Trek.

This was perfectly on-par with other licensed works Gold Key put out. Those works included Battle of the Planets, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Flash Gordon, and The Three Stooges, and were all just one-shot stories meant for the kids to buy with pocket money and toss out with the garbage later. There’s nothing wrong with this, seeing how that’s literally how comics were intended to be digested before Marvel would start revolutionizing comic storytelling in the 1960s. It just took longer to catch on with some companies.

The series would last a total of 61 issues, with about 7 issues being reprints recycling earlier content with a new cover. The second issue would not come out until March of 1968, and it would be released almost randomly from Gold Key as Star Trek continued. It would almost miss out on 1968 and 1969 entirely, but it would stretch out into 1979 with issues based loosely upon the original series. Artists would continue to use their weird alternate designs, like the green uniforms, or the brown hair for Spock. They would also add an orange uniform for Kirk, but green seemed to stick with the security teams. Interestingly, the final issue would be released in March of 1979, just one month before Marvel released their April 1979 first issue of their Star Trek: The Motion Picture adaptation.

Other issues in the Gold Key series would explore some utterly bizarre concepts. A personal favorite comes from issue 21 in November 1973, an issue I actually own thanks to some awesome grandparents. Titled The Mummies of Heitius VII, it’s believed this issue was worked on by John David Warner and Alberto Giolitti. This comic features a somewhat unexpected twist on Star Trek’s Monster of the Week format. Why?

The crew travels to an archeological dig on Heitius VII, where they’ve uncovered ancient mummies. All is perfectly fine until they start wandering around the ship and cracking skulls.

The mummies aboard the Enterprise would take over the ship and would try to enact their mysterious programming. Yes, programming, because they’re cyborg mummies. A distant not-Egyptian civilization would convert many of their higher leaders into these cyborg mummies in order to take the now-dead civilization to the stars. None of these plots had to make sense, and this was really just for the admittedly awesome imagery of Spock and McCoy blasting mummies with phasers.

Eventually, the day is saved by killing the mummies, and the crew is spared from the weird and vague plans of the alien cyborg mummies. Like the previous issue, it’s fairly weird and not quite Star Trek, but it’s a great comic if you’re looking for what used to be the rare “popcorn Star Trek,” where you don’t think about the plot beyond who’s gonna shoot whom. Like First Contact, but with random monsters.

The comic isn’t that hard to find on the secondary market, but issues are often in less than stellar condition since serious comic collecting wasn’t quite a common thing yet. IDW Comics also put out five volumes of archive releases of these comics, complete with digital coloring that approximated the original art (goofs and all), as well as cleaned up art. The downside is that these collections didn’t sell all that well, and stopped at issue 39 of 61. The other two planned volumes haven’t been heard of since their vague announcement in 2016, and are considered to have been dropped from IDW’s release schedule.

Perhaps that’s for the best. While I’m all for preservation of content on a historical and entertainment level, these are not the shining examples of Star Trek or licensed comics that we would eventually see the franchise reach. Marvel would be the next at bat with their own Star Trek adaptation, and we’ll have to look at that one.