The iconic slogan of the 1979s Stranger says that in space, no one can hear you scream. However, this does not appear to be the case for the original version. Star Trek TV series. This series did a great job of explaining that space was very dangerous and there was a lot of screaming, as every other mission the USS Enterprise took seemed to involve at least one crew member dying from screaming. Of course, the characters killed during these missions were usually security guards who wore red shirts. Over the years, this led to the colloquial term “red shirts” to describe cannon fodder on various missions.
This is the basis of the current Star Trek: Redshirts series from Christopher Cantwell and Megan Levens, which recently reached the halfway point of its five-issue run. One of the ways the series really highlights the plight of the “Red Shirts” is by showing the many disgusting ways they can get killed in space. As you can imagine, when working with phasers, lasers, photons, and transporters, there are a number of very disconcerting ways to die, not to mention all the monstrous aliens you encounter on different planets. A key point of this series is to show how deadly it is to be a redshirt, while also finding comedic effect in all of these terrible illnesses. It shows how absurd the role is, and yet we have characters who love their job so much that they are willing to endure these circumstances to do it. They take pride in the fact that they might die horribly during a mission.
Star Trek: Redshirts Issue #1 is by writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Megan Levens, with colors by Charlie Kirchoff and letters by Jodie Troutman. It tells the story of a group of security agents sent on a mission because someone is spying on a Federation planet. The officer assigned to the mission at the start is a 46-year-old redshirt officer, the oldest redshirt in all of Starfleet. Obviously, this is not a job in which you age. The plan is to lure the spies with some really juicy information. However, when you bait with juicy information and the spies get that information, you’re really in trouble. The spies have the information, and the Red Shirts must stop them from leaving the planet before it can be passed on to whoever they work for.
Who are the villains of the story?
In this issue, we reveal who the bad guys are trying to get this information. An interesting thing about Star Trek comic series is that they like to play with continuity by using characters who have unusually long lifespans, allowing characters to Star Trek: The Next Generation appearing in series like this that are set in the era of the original series. It’s certainly not a bad concept idea, but for me there aren’t many characters so famous that I think they deserve a silhouette revealing who the bad guy is. But that doesn’t matter and it’s not a major concern.
In this issue we see the heroic nature of these officers in a big way.
How did the Red Shirts do heroic things?
The Red Shirts do everything they can to prevent the spies from escaping. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING. They are ready to sacrifice their own lives for the mission.
However, at the same time, they understand that they are left for dead by Starfleet. This is where the key element of the series stands out, since they were all left to dry…
But they were still willing to do what needed to be done to complete the mission. There’s a moment at the beginning where they’re on the verge of committing suicide so they can kill the spies too…
But they are unable to do so, as they are shot down before they can do so. Throughout the issue, we see the agents REFUSING to give up, even when faced with such terrible situations. They’re all so heroic, and yet Cantwell plays with the absurdity of it all, because they’re all so heroic, but they repeatedly die in horrible, horrible ways.
The cover of the comic depicts a transporter malfunction, and sure enough, we see this happen in the comic. Levens has to figure out what THIS looks like in the comic, and boy is it messed up.
One thing I dig is that the comic marks out those who have died so far in the comic, and there are some characters whose names aren’t entirely crossed out, which certainly suggests something might happen in the future. I love these little hints of what might happen.
Source: IDW