Hasslein Blog: Help Get the British Star Trek Comic Strips Reprinted

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Hasslein Blog

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Help Get the British Star Trek Comic Strips Reprinted

By Rich Handley

Star Trek comic fans: It's time for a grass-roots campaign. Over the past couple of years, IDW's Library of American Comics (LOAC) imprint reprinted the hard-to-find L.A. Times Star Trek newspaper strips as a pair of beautifully made hardcover books, making the strips available to readers for the first time since the early '80s. The results were spectacular, with the strips looking better than they ever had before.


At the time, there were tentative plans to give the same treatment to the even-harder-to-find British strips (from the pages of Joe 90: Top Secret, TV21, Valiant and Mighty TV Comic). So far, however, nothing has materialized.

Just to be clear: These are not reprints of Gold Key's Star Trek comics—they're completely original material, published only in the United Kingdom, and they've never been made available to U.S. readers. Here are some sample strips:





I've been told that the plans were dropped, despite LOAC's enthusiasm for the project, possibly due to IDW's perception that there would not be a great deal of fan interest in them. Since I frequently have people asking me if those books are ever coming out, I know that's definitely not the case. Fans want these strips!


A grass-roots campaign to let IDW know otherwise might help sway their opinion. We already have the support of several websites and Star Trek authors (see the related links at the bottom of this post), and we need your help as well. I recommend that anyone interested in seeing the British strips reprinted by the Library of American Comics let IDW know—by e-mail, by Facebook message, by postal letter, whatever. Contacting LOAC might be a good idea as well. In addition, please share this article on any webpages and social-media pages that you maintain; the key is to get the word out there, to as many fans as possible, and to get them to do the same.



These strips may be loopy as hell, but they're equally fun—and they're unavailable to the vast majority of Trek comic collectors. But we can change that. How? Well, as it happens, I own the entire set of British strips in their original format (258 weekly issues and six hardcover annuals), which stand ready for Library of American Comics to borrow, scan and reprint, which I know that LOAC wants to do as long as IDW gives them the greenlight to proceed. Any help in spreading the word and getting the ball rolling on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!



(FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked on the L.A. Times reprint books, and had been slated to work on the British strip reprints as well. However, that has no bearing on my wanting to see these additional volumes made. I simply want fans to have access to the strips—and I want to see the books on my own shelves as well. I am, first and foremost, a fan.)

Related Links:

Dayton Ward: Help Get the British Star Trek Comic Strips Reprinted!

John Freeman: Fans Urged to Back Campaign to Collect British Star Trek Comics

Mark Martinez: The British Aren't Coming! The British Aren't Coming!

Star Trek Comics Checklist: British Comic Strips

Star Trek Comics Checklist: British Comic Strips in Books and Magazines

Trek.fm: Literary Treks 76 (discussion starts at 11:19)

Scifi Pulse: SFP-Now Featuring Writer and Publisher Rich Handley




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1 Comments:

At October 23, 2014 at 10:09 AM , Blogger Doc Savage said...

Maybe the Library of British Comics should be involved.

 

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