Star Trek: Enemy Unseen by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Scott Ciencin, Andrew Currie, Peter Pachoumis, Lucian Rizzo, et al.

Star Trek Classics #2: Enemy Unseen

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: September 2025

Written by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Christopher Golden & Tom Sniegoski, Scott Ciencin

Pencils by Peter Pachoumis & Scott Benefiel, Dave Hoover, Andrew Currie

Inks by Lucian Rizzo, Jason Martin, Troy Hubbs, Bryan Hitch & Chris Chuckry

Colors by Jeromy Cox, Chris Chuckry

Letters by Ryan Cline, Rob Robbins, & Nagmeh Zand

I got this "Star Trek Classics" collection from Hoopla; it contains three Star Trek: The Next Generation comic stories from the early 2000s, originally published by Wildstorm. The first is Perchance to Dream, a four-issue miniseries; this is set shortly before Star Trek Generations (it even features the film's mismatched uniforms), with the Enterprise-D coming to a Federation member planet where the aliens have three genders—but the new governor is being attacked by terrorists because she only has one partner, not the traditional two. It's a good premise for a TNG episode, but it's not a great comic: way too much dialogue and narration, plus art and coloring that makes the aliens largely indistinguishable from one another. Too many side characters on the Enterprise as well. There's a clever conceit here, in that Picard is sort of like a victim of multiple personality disorder (he also has the minds of Sarek, Locutus, and Kamin in his head), but this feels a bit tacked on as the resolution to the central maguffin, as opposed to being the central conception of the story.

The second story, "Embrace the Wolf," is set during season seven of TNG, and has the Enterprise encountering Redjac, the incorporeal alien from the original series's "Wolf in the Fold" which was supposedly Jack the Ripper. The story's best part is that it has Data battling Redjac in a holodeck simulation of Victorian London, with Data as Sherlock Holmes... but it just doesn't do very much with this idea, which really ought to have been the crux of the whole plot! The art is hit or miss; the artist seems to do particularly poorly with Troi and Crusher.

Also, Worf is randomly in this, but I kind of liked that—it was just how you told an Enterprise-E story in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you had to have Worf randomly pop up.
from Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Killing Shadows #3 (script by Scott Ciencin, art by Andrew Currie)

Lastly, there's The Killing Shadows, where the Enterprise-E (in the year before First Contact) battle evil alien ninjas. It's kind of incoherent and ridiculous, but I sort of admired that about it; it felt like a comic book in some ways, not just an attempt to render an episode on the page. But unfortunately it got dumber as it went on; I found it hard to believe that Riker could defeat a bunch of alien superninjas just because he stole their outfit. The inclusion of Sela is totally random. And I didn't really follow the climax at all.

So, yeah, "classics" may be a bit of an exaggeration, but as a Hoopla borrow this was fine. Glad I didn't pay for the print edition, though.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XIII: JSA: Justice Be Done

Comic trade paperback, 138 pages
Published 2000 (contents: 1999)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2011

JSA: Justice Be Done

Writers: James Robinson, David S. Goyer
Pencillers: Scott Benefiel, Stephen Sadowski, Derec Aucoin
Inkers: Mark Propst, Michael Bair
Colorist: John Kalisz
Letterer: Ken Lopez

There's a tiny cameo by the Daniel Hall Dream (man he's been popping up a lot of late), and Hector Hall, who was the third Sandman (after Garrett Sandford) finally returns from the Dreaming in this story, but the main Sandman element in Justice Be Done, the first volume of the 1990s JSA series, is the legacy of Wesley Dodds, the original 1930s Sandman. Justice Be Done merges two previously distinct versions of the character: the Wesley Dodds here is characterized the way Matt Wagner wrote him in Sandman Mystery Theatre, especially as regards his romance with Dian Belmont, but he still participated in the more fanciful adventures of the Golden Age version of the character. His sidekick Sanderson Hawkins even has a big role in this story, even though Sandman Mystery Theatre took some pains to established that "Sandy" didn't exist.

Wesley's brief appearance here culminates in his death, but he goes out like a hero, and it works. Having him battling cosmic forces in the mountains of Tibet jars with the SMT Wesley's encounters with powerless psychopaths in New York sewers, but the SMT was written as so smart and well-intentioned that you've no doubt he could have handled such situations had he been pushed into him. The building of the JSA memorial is a little harder to buy, and the oft-referenced fact that Wesley once built a "silicoid gun" that turned Sandy into a sand monster doesn't really fit at all, but then again, Justice Be Done isn't a Sandman Mystery Theatre story, but a no-holds-barred nostalgic Justice Society one, uniting a hodgepodge of characters with ties to the organization, from founding members, to the children of other founding members, from an android reincarnation of Hourman (who actually appeared in Sandman Mystery Theatre), to Wonder Woman's mom.

Even if you take Justice Be Done on its own terms, Sandy, who declares himself "Sand" here with some ferociously bad dialogue, is one of the less convincing elements of the story. The writers seem desperate to give him relevant powers: he starts out with Wesley Dodds's legendary gas gun, and he picks up Wesley's bad dreams as well, but he soon also acquires the power to turn into sand at will, not to mention "hyper-sensitized to seismic activity." For some reason. It's a disjointed powerset that reeks of an attempt to make something of this character, as does the hackneyed combination of man-out-of-time and trying-to-live-up-to-a-legacy characterizations, which try really hard to make him more than the most generic of sidekicks that he began as.

On a side note, I was amused by an introductory illustration of the new Justice Society, which labels illustrations of the characters to help the newbies. In this we see WILDCAT, STAR-SPANGLED KID, STARMAN, OBSIDIAN, BLACK CANARY, HOURMAN, and... AL ROTHSTEIN. Nice codename, dude.