Entertainment
Star Trek Is Releasing New DS9 And Voyager Stories In The Worst Possible Way
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
You remember that old short story, “The Monkey’s Paw”? It’s a creepy tale with a classic conceit: after a family receives the titular monkey mitten, they realize that they can make wishes on it. Those wishes come true, but in the worst possible way. Like, if you ask for money, you’ll get it, but only when your kid dies, and you receive their life insurance. At any rate, I had this story firmly in mind as I learned about the latest Star Trek project, one that is guaranteed to piss off everyone who hated Starfleet Academy.
Fans are getting the new Star Trek series we begged for, but not on Paramount+. Instead, they are online comics that will premiere on WEBTOON, a platform featuring vertical comics. One of these comics is Stargazers, a slice-of-life story about a young man finishing up school aboard Deep Space Nine. The other comic is Recollection, a more mature adult mystery about an amnesiac woman who wakes up on a mysterious starship. The most interesting thing about these comics is that they offer a canonical look at life after the Dominion War. Unfortunately, this move is one that is guaranteed to annoy older fans while failing to bring any younger fans into the fold.
Star Trek Goes… Vertical?
If you grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation or even The Original Series, you probably have a simple question right now: what the heck’s a webtoon? Webtoons themselves are vertical comics that are designed to be read on your phone rather than a tablet or desktop monitor. While often referred to as “episodes,” most webtoons are designed as static, scrollable panels rather than motion comics or other types of animation. Incidentally, WEBTOON is also the name of the popular webtoon platform that Paramount will be using to launch Stargazers and Recollection.
As you might imagine, webtoons are typically aimed at younger audiences, and that’s exactly who Paramount is targeting with these new comics. Stargazers is particularly youth-coded as it focuses on a young human (Leon) and his faithful canine companion as he tries to make friends and find love with a peer group that includes a Bajoran and a Changeling. It’s designed as a Boys’ Love comic, which means you can expect plenty of same-sex romance and quirky dating escapades with Leon and the boy of his dreams.
Star Trek Forgets All About It
Comparatively, Recollection is a more adult tale focusing on an amnesiac woman who wakes up on a weird Federation vessel with six other people and a holopilot who is seemingly lying to her. Eventually, she meets a Vulcan who seems to know who she is, and this logic-loving alien gives our hero a device that allows her to see fragments of her old life. By the time it’s over, she’ll need to solve puzzles old and new to fully unpack the mystery that her life has become.
On paper, these webtoons have a few things going for them. Paramount is clearly throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and dropping new Star Trek stories on the most popular webtoon platform may win over younger audiences in a way that Starfleet Academy couldn’t. Plus, making these stories canonical is a downright diabolical way to get older audiences to read them. We’re apparently never going to get a Star Trek: Legacy series, so Stargazers and Recollection just became the only real way to find out more about what happened in the 25th century after the Dominion War ended and after Voyager made it home.
Can Star Trek Fans Live With It?
However, my inner cynic can’t help but think that these webtoons will fizzle out to very little fanfare. Star Trek has had three animated series (gout if you count those awful YouTube shorts), but none of them managed to win over young fans. Meanwhile, Starfleet Academy was designed from the ground up as a romance-driven teen drama in space, but it never found the young audience it was desperately searching for. If smart, brightly-colored cartoons and an insanely flashy show filled with hot actors weren’t enough to recruit young fans, I don’t think a cheap web comic with the art design of a mobile game is really going to move the needle.
At the very least, while Starfleet Academy was hidden behind a streaming subscription, fans of all ages can check out these web comics for free. Stargazers: A Star Trek Story will be releasing its first three episodes on the WEBTOON app for free on May 17. Meanwhile, Recollection: A Star Trek Story will launch on the same platform later this year. With no new Star Trek shows in production, these may be the closest we’ll get to a new series in a good, long time, but maybe that’s for the best.
After all, we older fans have spent decades wanting new stories to explore what happened after Deep Space Nine and Voyager. If these comics bomb, we may collectively learn the major lesson of “The Monkey’s Paw”: be careful what you wish for!