[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:28] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. My name is David Hedgecock. I'm one of your regular hosts, here every single time, never missing a single beat, and with me is our regular show contributor, Mr. Eisner Award Nominated, Dave Baker.

[00:45] Eisner Nominated Dave Baker: Hey. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hey. Thank you.

[00:50] David: Dave, you have been on more episodes of season 2 than any other person, including John and myself. It's pretty amazing, man. You are the glue that binds season 2.

[01:00] Dave: That or I'm just bored and I'm like, “hey, guys. Want to hang out?

[01:03] David: The face you made when I said that you’re the glue that binds season 2. I think Dave threw up a little bit in this mouth. Dave, John’s not with us. I don't know how this is going to go without him. He is my crutch. He's my Robin to my Batman, or maybe I'm Robin to his Batman. One or the other. Anyway, I'm excited to dig into today's topic, though, even though John's not here. You've come up with a real humdinger and quite the challenge. So, Season 2, we've dedicated ourselves to doing some deeper dives into some lost and forgotten works, of one type or another, deserving or not. You came up with one that I think is going to be super fun to dive into, and you've done a lot of work, Dave.

[01:46] Dave: I read 22 issues of a main series, a special one-shot, and I skimmed a Star Trek annual that was fucking super long. It was a really long Star Trek annual.

[01:56] David: But each one of those 22 books was double-sized.

[02:00] Dave: Yes, 44--

[02:02] David: 44 comic books. The work is by one of the masters of the medium, widely recognized as being part of one of the greatest comic book runs in the history of comics.

[02:15] Dave: I would say he was part of at least 2, if not 3, of the greatest runs of all time.

[02:19] David: Yeah. So, we've got Uncanny X-Men. I guess, you're probably referencing his Fantastic Four run, and then maybe, She-Hulk. Would that be his third?

[02:25] Dave: I was going to say, I personally don't like it, but I know people, they heap a lot of critical praise on Man of Steel, the post-Crisis Superman.

[02:39] David: Oh, okay. In my pantheon, the third would be She-Hulk.

[02:41] Dave: Yeah, I would agree with that. You're not an Alpha Flight guy?

[02:4] David: I wanted to be an Alpha Flight guy. That's definitely in my wheelhouse. Those second-tier characters, scrapping and trying to make it, but it just never stuck with me. I think it's because they're Canadian.

[02:56] Dave: I like Northstar, and I like Puck.

[02:59] David: Yeah, Puck’s cool. Sasquatch was also very visually super cool. Vindicator.

[03:04] Dave: Yeah, I never really got into Alpha Flight, either. The point is, today's topic is, we're going to--

[03:10] David: Yeah, we're not here to talk about any of that, Dave.

[03:14] Dave: We're going to discuss, in-depth, John Byrne’s seminal 22-issue, and an annual, and a one-shot, Star Trek photocomic series.

[03:24] David: That's right. We’re going to ignore all that other stuff that he's done. We're going to do a deep dive into Star Trek: New Visions, John Byrne’s other masterpiece.

[03:40] Dave: So, just to get this out of the way, up top, the essay that I'm going to be reading, this format is going to be a little different than some of the other more discussion-based episodes that I've been on with you guys, that you've so kindly had me on your podcast, where this one I'm going to be reading an essay that I've written for a new comics criticism magazine called Comics Courier, which is created by Tiffany Babb, and the lineup of people in it are awesome. It's me, Douglas Wolk, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and a bunch of other people that are really cool thought leaders in the comic space. Not that I'm one of those people, but the rest of the people are really cool. It's called the Comics Courier, and it's on Kickstarter right now.

[04:20] David: Shockingly, Dave, I was not invited to write for this. I can't believe that they weren't interested in my thoughts and opinions on the latest Rob Liefeld Deadpool team-up.

[04:34] Dave: I'm very excited about it because I think a lot of the content is just going to span the gamut. It's going to be people writing about a bunch of different stuff, and my inclination is probably to write about more indie things, but then I was trying to come up with this topic to write about that would be something that could be applicable to a more mainstream audience but would be just inherently weird, and that sums up Star Trek: New Visions to a T.

[04:59] David: Yeah. So, just to lay a little bit of groundwork, from my side, thank you for all that. I'm very excited about this project, Dave. I hope people go to Kickstarter and check it out. Can you say the name of it again?

[05:11] Dave: The Comics Courier, by Tiffany Babb, and it is on Kickstarter right now, and in fact, I've got the page open right here. I'm just going to read all of the other contributors. So, we have done our due diligence. So, it's me, Douglas Wolk, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Lilly Hochwender, Jim McDermott, Tiffany Babb, Carrie McClain, Sean Dillon, Lisa and Brad Gullickson of Comics Couples Therapy, Kat Calamia, and Liam McGuire, and everybody's going to be writing 2000-word-ish thought pieces on whatever comics they are interested in right now. There's also going to be a lot of illustrations. I'm also doing an illustration for it. Yeah, I think it's going to be really cool. It's up on Kickstarter currently.

[05:57] David: I've heard a little bit about this one. Joking aside, I'm interested to get my copy. I think it's going to be good. I didn't know, 2000 words, that's a pretty hefty lift for comics criticism. So, that's interesting. Do you know, what's the page count?

[06:10] Dave: I don't know the logistics of that stuff, thankfully, because Tiffany is doing all of it, and I don't have to do anything. All I’ve got to do is turn up, give my work, and fucking go to sleep.

[06:22] David: Yeah, and you're already repurposing that work into other stuff.

[06:26] Dave: Oh, yeah. I'm probably going to do an episode of my podcast, Deep Cuts, the Deep Dive Explainer Podcast, because it's such a weird topic that I feel like most people don't even know exists. I feel like, in other mediums, the Chris Gaines era of Garth Brooks' career is really well known. It's a cultural punching bag, or the various eras of Bowie's career, where he was in very different characters, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. Prince, he has all these, the era where he did the Insignia and had to go by “the artist formerly known as Prince,” because he legally changed his name in order to get out of a record contract. All of those strange experimental periods are very well known, and they are viewed with a raised eyebrow in other mediums, but for ours, because so much of it is based on nostalgia and based on, “but I love this thing, but I care about this,” when people have those strange dalliances, or maybe career low points, they're not typically remembered, unless they're really extreme. What was the one where Arsenal beat a bunch of meth heads with a dead cat, and it was deemed the worst comic book of all time?

[07:36] David: I don't know about that.

[07:39] Dave: Dude, yeah. This is something that you should definitely check out. So, I believe, was his name JT Krul? He was a writer for a bunch of Zenescope or Fathom, TT-esque books, or whatever. He also was a production assistant on Seinfeld. Why do I know this? Because this is the type of things that I remember. I think it was JT Krul. It was either him or James Robinson. I can't remember. I hope it was him, because James Robinson's a really great writer. JT Krul maybe has some great writing, but most of the stuff I've seen from him has been fine, Journeyman-level, whatever, you're doing it, and he wrote an issue, I believe it was called Cry for Justice. It was a JSA book, maybe 10-15 years ago, and I think it's called Cry for Justice, and it was when they were re-moving him from the Red Arrow back to Arsenal, I want to say. Speedy Roy Harper relapses, does drugs again, and goes on this crazy spree where he loses control, and the point of the issue is, it's like, “oh no. Roy’s lost control. He's doing wrong,” and the climax of the issue is, he goes into an alley to do the normal superhero stopping crime thing, but he grabs a dead cat and uses it like a nun-chuck, from the tail, and beats dudes to death with it. It's so bad.

[09:06] David: That sounds amazing.

[09:07] Dave: It is amazing, but it's amazing in a “this is shocking that this got through,” and in certain circles, that's remembered as the worst comic book of all time.

[09:17] David: JT Krul’s like, “I need to challenge my artist. What can I do? I know what to do.”

[09:23] Dave: I'm pretty sure it was JT Krul, but it might have been Robinson.

[09:27] David: He probably didn't write the word “nun-chuck.” He probably wrote the word “cat-chuck.”

[09:30] Dave: Oh, 100%.

[09:32] David: We’re creating cat-chucks.

[09:33] Dave: Cat-chucks, bro.

[09:35] David: And the artist is just like, “hell, yeah.”

[09:37] Dave: Yeah. I almost wrote about that, and then I also almost wrote about Skateman. I'm assuming you know the story of Skateman?

[09:44] David: Yeah. We've talked about Skateman on this podcast, actually.

[09:46] Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. So, Skateman is also another one of those big, it's the worst comic of all time. So, I almost did those. This proved, I think, to be harder to research because there's so much more, and also it provided more to write about, because at a certain point, what are you going to say? “Oh, yeah, it's really in poor taste that Roy Harper beats dudes to death with a cat?”

[10:12] David: The end.

[10:13] Dave: Yeah. The end.

[10:13] David: It’s hard to get 2000 words on that.

[10:16] Dave: That being said, when Tiffany said, “you only have 2000 words,” I was like, “Oh, my God. That's it?”

[10:22] David: You're out of control. I don't think even say 2000 words in a whole week. Writing 2000 words would be very difficult, for me.

[10:32] Dave: David, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but I'm something of a maximalist at almost everything in life.

[10:37] David: I do get that impression. From my side of it, just to lay a little groundwork when these books were coming out, I was actually working at IDW. I think I was the Managing Editor, might have been Editor-In-Chief for a bit of that, too, but this is one of those projects that, even internally, everyone was like, “wait. What's John Byrne doing?” We all just were perplexed, and every time a new issue would come in like clockwork, on a deadline. John was a workhorse. Always hit the deadline, and we would just all be like, “man, what is this that we are witnessing? What are we watching?” It was a very curious, very strange piece, even internally, but the funny thing is that, as I understand it, this book, when it first came out, it was just intended as a fun one-shot, and I don't know if there was some version of photomontage done previously in a gold key. Anyway, this was done.

John Byrne did it, intended as one-shot, but the sales were so good on it, and John wanted to keep doing it. So, we just kept doing it, and even at the end, when we finished it off, that book was still profitable. It was still a book that was selling enough to justify its existence. Not that it was burning up the sales charts, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a rock-solid book that you put out every two months, and you knew exactly what you were going to get back towards the end, and it was just perfectly fine. We could’ve run that thing, probably another, who knows how long. There was a certain segment of the audience, I don't know if it's necessarily John Byrne audience, I think it's probably more the Star Trek audience, towards the end, they just were into it. That's my association with it, as we're going into this.

[12:23] Dave: It's a mesmerizing catastrophe. I'm obsessed with this genre that I pretty much have just made-up. I mean, I don't know that anybody else thinks this is a real term, but I call them Noble Failures, which is when somebody's trying to make their masterpiece and the thing just collapses under its own weight, and it doesn't really work, but you're there because of the ambition of the thing. Prometheus is a perfect example of, Ridley Scott thought he was reinventing cinema, and then forgets about basic stuff, like character motivation or scenes connecting, and that scope creep, and a lack of craft, relating to basic storytelling structures, in service of whatever these greater thematic points are, is so mesmerizing to me, and it's my favorite fucking thing ever, and I didn't really know that that's what this book was when I started it. I thought it was just going to be, I don't know, John Byrne playing with toys, smashing them together, which it is, but it also is so much weirder than that.

[13:27] David: Yeah, it's weird. It's a weird one. Okay, well, let's dive into it. I'm anxious to hear your thoughts and words on this. So, we just go. Yeah, okay.

[13:39] Dave: The new and deeply strange frontier, or how John Byrne stopped drawing and learned to love the lasso tool. Thank you. It's not an overstatement to declare that John Byrne is one of the most important figures in the history of superhero comics. From building the modern foundation of the X-Men to reconstituting Superman post-crisis, he's got numerous notable achievements in his long and illustrious career. He also has Next Men, Danger Unlimited, and Babe, all creator-owned works that prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, John Byrne is best when working off of other people's ideas. Byrne’s key strength as a storyteller is an ability to cherry-pick the high points out of an overly long-in-the-tooth book and remold it into something fun and engaging. For lack of a better explanation, his brilliance lives in the ability to understand how to restore a narrative’s status that's very similar to whatever the original creators of the book established, but have it diverged just enough to be enthralling to readers. Byrne’s Fantastic Four is a perfect example of this easily dismissible creative talent. His run on the title, from issue #232 to issue #295 is often heralded as one of a select few to ever rival Kirby’s, and yet, that's not what we're here to discuss. We're going to do a deep dive into an area of John Byrne’s career almost no one considers notable, important, or even vaguely readable, John Byrne’s Star Trek: New Visions.

So, before we keep going, I want to circle back to a couple of things I wrote there. One, I'm assuming that you were following a lot of Byrne’s high points and enjoying them.

[15:26] David: No, I actually wasn't.

[15:27] Dave: Really?

[15:30] David: No, I am such an outsider. I really am. Everybody else was like, “Uncanny X-Men is the bomb,” and I was like, “how about Speedball?” I was like, “hmm, that Uncanny X-Men is really sweet, but this Transformers comic book over here is way better.” Everyone else is like, “Oh, my God, Dale Keown on the Incredible Hulk is amazing. It's just the best stuff ever,” and I'm like, “Jeff Purves is my Incredible Hulk guy.” So, that's where I’m at. So, John Byrne, he always left me cold. I don't know why. Of the two guys, George Perez and John Byrne, the guys that took over in the late 70s, into the 80s, of those two guys, both of them just didn't have a style that was all that appealing to me. I actually, later-on, learned to really appreciate George Perez. I do genuinely like and enjoy his work now, in retrospect, but in the time, in the moment, it just wasn't something that was really grabbing me. I was off looking at other guys, more interested in different things, but even to this day, John Byrne doesn't click with me. When he takes over Uncanny X-Men, I was doing a reread of that series, starting with the Giant Size X-Men, Issue #94, when Byrne takes over the series, I stop enjoying it as much, legitimately. Even now, reading it as a guy with an eye towards it, I wanted Dave Cockrum to keep going. When he leaves, I'm just completely bummed, and then in the early 90s, John Byrne gets into it with a bunch of those early-90s artists, like Liefeld and McFarlane, and Liefeld/McFarlane, the Image guys, those are my guys. If you're going to make me choose a side, it ain't going to be yours, buddy. I’ve just never been a John Byrne guy.

[17:13] Dave: Do you also hate Peter David?

[17:16] David: No, I don't have any problem with Peter David's stuff. I thought his run on Incredible Hulk was really good. Some of his X-Factor stuff clicked with me, too, but outside of the Incredible Hulk run that he did, which it's notable for its incredible run of incredible artists. It goes from McFarlane to, I don't care what you think, Jeff Purves was really, really good, to Jeff Purves, and then Gary Frank, and Dale Keown, and Liam Sharp’s in there. Yeah, Liam Sharp finishes it up. That is a murderers’ row of incredible talent. So, Peter David, that was 10 years’ worth of material, almost, that Peter David was just working with some of the best artists, ever.

[17:53] Dave: And Perez closes the run with Future Imperfect, right?

[17:55] David: That's right. I think his work on Incredible Hulk, in particular, I always liked it. I always thought Peter David’s stuff was really good. He did some fun stuff over there at DC with Young Justice, and I think he did-- Young Justice is the one that's coming to mind. So, no, I don't have a problem with him. I know he had some beefs too, but that, I ignored.

[18:16] Dave: Well, also, your guy, McFarlane, just objectively lost against him.

[18:23] David: Yeah.

[18:24] Dave: I love McFarlane, but him trying to just brute force charisma through that beef with Peter David is super funny, where Peter David comes with sales numbers and flow charts, and has written doctoral theses and he's just like, “I'm not wearing a shirt.”

[18:43] David: Yeah, I think McFarlane, his art, I've always liked, but the man is like, “take him or leave him,” whereas somebody like, and I know this is a bit controversial, but somebody like Rob Liefeld, I love the art, and I love the man more because everything about Rob Liefeld, for me, is entertaining. That guy's fantastic. Everything about him is amazing, whereas with McFarlane, it's more just about the art. Marc Silvestri's in that camp where I think he's also just the coolest dude in the room. Every time you see him, like “who's that dude? Oh, that's the coolest guy in the room. It's Marc Silvestri,” and his art is also the coolest art. You don't see Marc Silvestri for 10 years and then he just shows up with that Batman book, like, “what? Oh, Marc just wanted to remind everybody who one of the all-time greats is.”

[19:34] Dave: If you're unfamiliar, Byrne started working at IDW in the mid-2000s, taking on writing and drawing duties on various smaller Star Trek projects. The odd miniseries here, the stray Alien spotlight issue there. However, in 2013, he attempted to create a fumetto, the Italian word for comics, using photos instead of hand-drawn artwork, for IDW's Star Trek Annual #3. It went over well enough, and in 2014, Byrne embarked on one of the strangest artistic periods of experimentation that any mainstream creator has ever attempted. He wrote and “illustrated” 22 issues of a special one-shot of a new series that would feature artwork exclusively created using digital collage of images from the original Star Trek series, bizarrely dated-looking CGI renderings of aliens and foreign worlds, and amateur actors wearing homemade costumes. This sounds like something that would live on a Star Trek fan forum, not something that would have been officially published.

[20:39] David: But I think that's what it is. I think John Byrne is just, I don't know, the way I looked at this is, and I think Chase Marotz, who's also been on the show recently, said this. So, I'm stealing it from him, but it's like watching a 60-year-old man play with his action figures down in the basement. That's what this feels like, and I don't know, I have no association with it. Even though I was working there at the time, I don't know have a lot of inside knowledge or association with what was going on, but what it felt like, to me, was John Byrne was retired and he just really loves the original Star Trek, and he wanted to make some new stories to fill in some gaps and holes that he saw in specific episodes. So, he just did that, and he was like, “drawing it was going to be too much work, but if I do this photo collage,” it'll probably be, A, fun for him, because he's just messing around on his computer with his lasso tool. It allows him to do the thing that he wants to do it, and the closest to creating an actual episode is he can do, by himself.

[21:45] Dave: It's just so fucking weird, and also, it's not good comics, because he has a certain set of images. So, he's basically Frankenstein-ing them into a book. So, a lot of the sequential narrative stuff, I know that John Byrne knows how to tell a story sequentially, but he can't because of the design remit at hand. So, he has to squeeze 10 lbs. of shit into a 5 lb. bag, and then there's only so many Captain Kirk heads. So, you have to get a panel of Captain Kirk looking to the left, but his body's looking to the right. So, then you flip it in Photoshop, but it doesn't look right. So, then you cut off the arm and you take the arm from a different still and put that there. So, everything is just really janky. Even stuff that doesn't need to be janky, is janky. It's mesmerizing.

[22:35] David: Yeah, in a, watching a car accident, way.

[22:38] Dave: Completely, but also in a way that, for me, replicated when I was first learning how to read comics, and becoming obsessed with the artifice of a fully drawn, finished, colored, lettered page, was just inscrutable. I mean, I was like, “a god must have made these. I don't understand how a human can draw buildings like this. This is crazy,” and I have a similar fascination with New Visions, because every page, I'm constantly looking for repeated heads, repeated hands, repeated backgrounds, looking at how he's moving characters around in space and using clone tool, and using the lasso tool, and it's so fucking weird, and it's also weird that he doesn't do shadows. He could have covered up a lot of these mistakes by just dropping digital shadows or doing silhouettes, and he doesn't do any of that, and it's so fucking weird.

[23:34] David: Yeah. It's all very flat. I don't know. I think that's a choice. I think that that might be a choice. I don't know if it's a choice of expediency or not, but I think that that is a definite choice. I noticed that, as well.

[23:47] Dave: Now, while your mileage may vary on how successful these books are, one person decidedly beat the drum for their artistic efficacy. IDW's, at the time, head honcho, Chris Ryall, who served as Editor on the series, and chief Byrne-wrangler. In a 2018 interview with comicbook.com, Ryall told journalist, Russ Burlingame, “what John does on these photonovel stories is nothing short of amazing. He's moved far beyond photo manipulation and montage to constructing his own set pieces, uniforms, and characters. Much more than just comic stories, these tales are the closest thing to Original Series-era lost episodes that the world will ever see.” Ryall's emphasis on the artistic daring-do of the artist, while also emphasizing the idea that John Byrne is good at understanding what makes these properties tick, is absolutely how you should try and communicate to people the weirdness of the project, while also assuring them of the professionalism at the writer at hand. However, the end result is something that is neither fish nor fowl. It's a shambling narrative homunculus that's either kneecapped by its own ambition or stumbling forward due to its endless and innumerable ineptitudes. Your perspective on this matter is all dependent on how hard you squint. I know we talked a little bit about the craft of it, but let's dig in there a little bit more. A, how many of these shits did you fucking read, and how did they measure up? Because I know you were around when they were being made, but were they weirder than you remembered? Were they about the same?

[25:24] David: I had no association with these books, because Chris Ryall was the Lead Editor on that stuff. So, we didn't really see it, other than I'd get a comp copy, I'd flip through, make sure everything looked good, looked correct, and make sure everything printed properly, but it was more of a workman approach to that stuff. When we're pumping out 80 books a month, you can't possibly have time to read everything, and it was Chris Ryall’s baby. So, even if you saw something, you weren’t going to say something. So, really my first true interaction with this material, as a fan or as a comic reader, was in this dive that I did over the last week or two. So, I got through about 7 or 8 issues worth of material, and it's just a strange indulgence. I took two things away from this. One was that Byrne just must truly love the original Star Trek stuff. There is a passion for the original series that does come through, and I find that charming. I do. The choices that he makes, in terms of how he's presenting that material to his audience is also, in a way, quite charming, because there is just this passion project. So, that was one thing that took away from it, because it's just fanfic, and the other thing I took away from it was that comics will break you.

Comics will absolutely break you, and I feel like there's a little bit of that going on in this, as well, where you've got this guy who's had a storied career, he spent every day for 20 years at a drawing board in a basement somewhere, diligently and meticulously drawing comic books with just his own thoughts, for most of the day, most likely, and at a certain point, that can really mess with your head, I think, if you're not careful, and I think there's a little bit of that happening here. I think, you see it. So, those are my two big takeaways. There's some funny little bits just in the ones that I read, though. Chris Ryall almost immediately shows up as a character, which made me laugh, because I don't know if this is a known thing or not, but Chris actively finds ways to get himself into almost every book he ever edits. So, you will see some version of his face in just about everything he's ever done, which I think is hilarious. I love that, and I always wanted that for myself, as well, but I could never seem to figure out how to pull it off, and Chris, it was always happening for him, and I don't think he ever asked for that, by the way. I don't know how he would Jedi mind-trick the artist into doing that stuff, but he would. So, it was funny to see him way early in the series. He's somebody's boyfriend.

[28:08] Dave: Oh, not just somebody. He's Yeoman Rand's deceased partner, that she was so upset that he died that she left the Enterprise.

[28:18] David: That's right. Yeah. Perfect. That was funny, and then there's a couple other guest appearances and stuff. I guess the other notable thing, for me, was in terms of just the book itself, the stories are just what they are. I'm sure I've seen all the Original Star Trek, at this point. I’m not a huge Star Trek guy. I like Star Trek, but Next Generation’s more my speed. That's the one that I really paid attention to, and then also, if I'm going to do a deep dive in sci-fi, I'm going to go more Star Wars than I'm going to go Star Trek. Although, both of them seem to have lost their way, for me, right now, but I guess that's a different topic. Anyway. I don't know if that answers your question.

[29:02] Dave: No, it totally does. It totally does.

[29:03] David: The stories are rather average, but they're interesting. Issue #3 is called Cry Vengeance, and it's a story of an alien, alone and isolated, who never reaches the ultimate goal. In this particular instance, the goal is to destroy this weapon of mass destruction that he's been following for literally 3,000,000 years, to try to actually figure out a way to destroy this weapon, and the Enterprise comes along and destroys the weapon, and he doesn't get to do it, basically, and it's a riff off of an actual episode. It's a follow-up to an actual episode, but I thought, “Oh, that seems rather, portrait of the artist, in a way. Alone and isolated, and chasing windmills, in a way.” Again, there's something charming about the work. There is that in it.

[29:59] Dave: I think there's probably 2 buckets, in terms of the style of issues. There's, “hey, remember that old episode?” and then, “Oh, this would have made a good episode.” He does so many just, “we're going to do Tribbles. We're going to do the Mirror World, or Mirror Dimension.” He checks all the boxes of the stuff from the Original Series that he wants to do. The Orion slave girl, whatever. 2/3 of the issues are just him checking those boxes, and then the other ones are Roddenberry-esque trite, trope-y Star Trek episodes. They're not bad, but they're not bringing something new to the table. He's a really great craftsman, in terms of dialogue. He knows what these characters would do. He knows what the characters sound like, and if he ran them through these exact same stories, but they were just illustrated by John Byrne at his peak, I think they would be improved by 2 to maybe 3 letter grades, but because there's the ineptitude of the craft, of making the comic with the objective competency of the storyteller, who's in full capable control of his narrative instincts, it's even weirder.

It's one thing when there's Sonic the Hedgehog fan comics, where they don't really understand left to right, they don't understand character voices. So, it's just somebody literally dictating their diary entries from Sonic's mouth, or whatever, which is fascinating. I love those things, too, but the disparate jump between the skill of the Photoshop manipulation image bashing and the, “oh, he knows what to do with Spock. He knows. Fascinating.”

[31:48] David: Yeah, there's a couple really good ones. There's also, yeah, one of the episodes ends with Spock looking at the camera, saying, “what it means to be,” and then looks at the camera, “human,” and I'm like, “that is the most Original Star Trek thing ever.” There's a couple of bits where Dot has a snide remark to Spock, which is also just perfect. So, yeah, it is odd. It is a weird piece, man. It is weird. I agree, and you're right. That does create a dissonance in my mind, because it's exactly what you’re saying. It's this level of crap here, but it's also this weird outsider art piece at the same time, and it's super fun.

[32:36] Dave: John Byrne, at his peak, was a brilliant draftsman. However, those days are long gone. The books in question aren't even drawn. So, whatever skill he once possessed in that area literally isn't even admissible, in the case of John Byrne V Star Trek fans with one iota of taste. Each issue of Star Trek: New Visions is as close to a corporately controlled piece of outsider art that will probably ever be made, which again, is either your favorite thing ever or pure garbage. The book's major dissonant frequency is the lopsided relationship between Byrne’s expert ability to capture the vocal tics of long-time Star Trek cast members, and the complete amateurism on display in the sequential art department. To assess what Byrne is striving for, as experimental, would be kind. To call it downright ugly would be a more honest evaluation. The tension between the competency of the writing and the incompetency of the art is what makes the work utterly fascinating, however. There are two wolves living inside John Byrne, and one of them is a pretty solid fanfic writer. The other hates the idea that 2 characters in a scene would have heads that are appropriately sized for their bodies.

Who knows if it's due to the available images, but the first few issues of the series feel very stilted and awkward, like they're made by someone who's uneasy with the medium of comics. The fact that they're coming from someone as accomplished as Byrne should be an indicator as to the behind-the-scenes technical challenges he was grappling with. As the book arcs towards its eventual conclusion, it feels like Byrne settles into an uneasy, clunky, and otherworldly visual rhythm, while exploring some kind of fun continuity bait for long-time Trekkers, prime examples of which being the story, Such Sweet Sorrow, which explains why Yeoman Rand left the Enterprise, and a one-page strip about M’Ress and Sulu's first meeting.

Again, I don't know how much of this landed for you, but for me, the main stories were always a slog. They feel too long, they're over-bloated, I didn't really give a shit, and then those 4-page backup stories or the 1-page backup stories that he was doing, initially, they were 4-page backup stories, and then they're just, “next time on” trailers, and then he starts doing, “next time on,” in three pages, and then a one-page strip towards the back half, and I really liked those little tiny short stories, where it's just a little character moment or a little “this is where that character comes from,” or whatever, because M’Ress was the cat lady that was introduced in the animated series, as a love interest for Sulu, who's never appeared in any of the live action shows, which is a big shame. I really like her. He has the little meet-cute of “Sulu and his buddy are on the Enterprise, and this cat woman's going to be joining the crew. She's a cutie.” It's fun.

[35:34] David: Yeah. I guess my reaction is not the same, although I don't think the little shorts, it was just a series of short vignettes. I don't think that would work, either. I think it only works when it's sitting next to the larger piece, but yeah, I generally agree with you that the lead stories are a bit of a slog. The dialogue is definitely the star of the show. It really is the thing that carries the story forward, because to your point, the photo montage is not the thing that's doing that. So, he's really relying heavily on the dialogue to carry the story forward, and get all the character and plot in place, and make it recognizable and understandable. I think one of the things that I vaguely recall is someone saying, at some point in this run, and it seems obvious to me, is that two things happened during the run, between Issue #1 and Issue #22.

A, technology started getting a little bit better. Photoshop just naturally was improving, over the course of three or four years. So, things start getting better. B, John's technical expertise started getting a little bit better, as well. So, there were improvements there. At a certain point, John had created so many different sets, and had so many different lasso pieces pulled out, that he had a full library that he could pull from, towards the end. So, it wasn't quite the ugly Frankenstein. Things were stitched together a little bit finer, a little bit better, because he would have a big set piece already created. He was able to focus a little bit more on making it a little more refined, but it never gets there.

[37:17] Dave: Which is fascinating, though. Towards the end, he really starts swinging for the fences, in terms of doing things. There's an episode where there's an alternate universe Kirk, or a clone Kirk, or something. I don’t remember, but he takes Shatner's face and then Photoshops a beard on Shatner in every panel. Issue #18, the Enterprise gets sucked up into this big psychically created water pool, by an alien or whatever. So, the Enterprise is flooding for the entire issue. So, it's weird CGI, Photoshop paint, water over everything, and people flopping around, and then not only is he digitally putting water into scenes where there is no water. He's also putting digital wetness sheen all over people's costumes and their faces, which is hideous. It is objectively the lowest point. I would rather read the, “I can't really do it,” from the early issues than bizarre digital K-Y Jelly all over everyone. It's so visually repulsive. Everyone is just glistening in this horrible orgiastic visual feast of creative ineptitude.

[38:31] David: Oh, God. How do you really feel?

[38:34] Dave: I really feel like I like it, frankly. I'm into it. I like it because it is the closest thing I've seen in comics to the fall from grace that maybe somebody like George Romero had, where Night, Dawn, Day, even Land, Land less so, but Night, Dawn, Day, are amazing films, and then you get to Survival of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, and you're like, “has this guy ever seen a movie? What is this?” And I understand that the guy, he's had his heart broken, he's old, he's physically infirm, he doesn't want to make these movies anymore, but he's making them because the distribution company that gave him the money said, “you can own your characters.” So, he's like, “fine. Fuck it. I'll take one final swing, so I can own my own characters, and maybe that'll be something,” and the movies are just, frankly, I forget they exist. They're so bad. Night, Dawn, Day, Land, I watch those movies maybe once every year, once every two years. Survival and Diary, I have not seen since they were in theaters, because they hurt my soul, and they hurt my soul, not even just because they are bad, which they are, but they hurt my soul because I know that George Romero deserves better and should be allowed to make movies that don't involve motherfuckers going, [zombie Dave noise]. He wants to make other movies, but everybody's like, “George, just do the zombie thing again.”

[40:05] David: I don't know. Getting old’s a hell of a thing. Sometimes, it’s more that than anything else.

[40:11] Dave: Yeah. I mean, it's D, all the above. He physically was infirm while making those movies. He was not doing well, but I feel the same way about this, where I'm just so mesmerized by the effort put in and the subpar output. You'd think, one of the greatest sequential artists to ever work in North American comics, if he was really swinging for the fences, would be able to do something really fucking cool, even just putting a digital grain filter over those photos.

[40:40] David: I don't think that's what he's trying to do.

[40:42] David: You don't? What do you think he's trying to do?

[40:44] David: No. Oh, he's definitely not swinging for the fences. I've already said it. I think he's playing with his toys in his basement. I think he's just messing around and having fun. It's charming. He just doesn't care what you think about it. He's just making the thing he wants to make, and he happens to be getting paid to do it, and it happens to be selling enough for him to continue doing It for a good long time. I don't think he cares, at all. I think he's just playing with toys. He's playing with his Photoshop in his room, just messing around. I don't know. I think there's a certain level of craft, because he's just got that, innately, because over a 20/30-year career, at this point, when he's doing this stuff, I don't think he's concerned about what anyone thinks about this. I think he's just literally having fun. I think he's just messing around, and he's John Byrne. So, it's going to be on a bigger stage. His dalliances and messing around is going to be on a slightly bigger stage than somebody like me.

[41:45] Dave: You and me both. Due to the fact that the majority of the assets for the series were derived from screengrabs of the show, the comic has an ethereal and undead feeling to it. Characters’ faces have alternating and contradictory light sources. Hands are Photoshopped onto different bodies, and bizarrely, hexagonal alien terrains feel like they were made in MS Paint in 1994, instead of Photoshop in 2014. In a certain context, you can tell this project was the most John Byrne-esque puzzle box the acclaimed auteur ever tackled. He does some genuinely brilliant character work and a few really touching send-offs to characters, like the story, Memorium, a narrative eulogy for the recently deceased T’Pring actor, Arlene Martel.

Ultimately, Star Trek: New Visions is more like Star Trek: Strange Conversation Starter For Nerds In A Hotel Basement Science Fiction Convention. You want it to be Byrne delivering on Chris Ryall’s promise of stories so good that, if you just look past the terrible art, they practically are lost episodes. Tragically, they're anything but. The book eventually settles into its proper context: a footnote, an oddity, and an unexplainable dalliance that one of the most successful writers and artists in comics spends 4 years of his life on. What did John Byrne get out of this project? Did he scratch the itch to be closer to the adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise? From the outside, these books appear to be nothing but an unmitigated failure. However, they also don't feel like something for external consumption.

Star Trek: New Visions feels like a Henry Darger-esque compulsion that Byrne had to pursue. Unlike Byrne’s efforts in other work-for-hire projects, he never seems to arrive at his unique thesis of what Star Trek is. He's got the standalone adventure issues and his stories that are nostalgic remixes of iconic episodes. The monastic devotion to Roddenberry ultimately collapses under its own weight. At the end of the day, the book has little to offer, other than each issue’s 3-5 CGI alien monsters, and its cameo from 30-Rock’s Scott Adsit. That's right. Pete from 30-Rock is in Star Trek: New Visions. How? That's a conundrum almost as perplexing as, why does this comic exist? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[44:21] David: Well, Dave, I think it's safe to say that you've officially put more thought and time into this series than John Byrne himself.

[44:31] Dave: I would love to talk to John Byrne about what the pre-production of this is like. Did he have assistants that helped him go through everything and screengrab everything?

[44:40] David: I don't think he had assistants. I don't think that's what was going on. I think he was just doing it himself.

[44:44] Dave: So, then what was his file management system like? Did he have like, “I have got a Captain Kirk folder, a Spock folder, a bones folder, background folders,” or is it just chaos and he's just like, “fuck it. I don't know”?

[44:47] David: Yeah. He must have been creating folders of assets. He had to have. There had to be some sort of organization built in. I know that a lot of the sets, he built himself, and he built them purposefully clunky, because he wanted to hit the spirit of the clunky sets that the original Trek series had. So, I think some of that background set funkiness is purposeful. I seem to recall having a conversation with Chris, or maybe it was somebody that we were talking about John just slogging through, finding some particular face that he had been looking for, for 3 days, and he hadn't been able to find it yet. So, I think, on my fuzzy memory, I think he was doing all himself.

[45:40] Dave: Which is fascinating, because in 2014, and maybe this is just because John isn't plugged into the fandom space, at all, but in 2014, James Cawley was at the peak of his powers, the guy the Elvis impersonator in upstate New York who built the Enterprise set and made a bunch of fan series. So, John could have just gone there, and shot. They literally made fan series. John could have gone there, shot all of the stuff he needed, and then just Photoshopped exclusively the heads on to the various fan actors.

[46:13] David: You know how an artist will put restrictions or parameters, or a writer puts restrictions or parameters around the book, around the project? I don't know if you do that, but I do that all the time, where I'm like, “okay, I'm not going to have any internal dialogue in this book. You will never read anybody thinking. It's always going to be whatever the external dialogue is. Maybe the occasional caption of some sort,” but I set these ground rules for the story, and a lot of that's based on whatever the story is, whatever the story calls for. I'm assuming that he probably had some internal rules about how he was approaching the project, just because I think that's how you approach the craft. Maybe I'm just the only one that does that. I don't know.

[46:52] Dave: No, I think it has to have been something like that, and I think even as I’m saying, jokingly, “he could have done all these things and made it easier,” that's not what this guy wants. He wants to be as close as possible to the Original Series and use the actual assets, because that's his strength. His strength is seeing, “what is the minimum that we need to restore this to? What's the baseline?” and compress everything to that, and that's visually represented in this series, because he's taking the 50-year franchise and discarding everything that's not William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley.

[47:28] David: Yeah, that's good. An interesting piece. I don't know. My gut reaction or gut instinct says that this is just, again, he's just playing. This is just somebody retired. He doesn't need money. He's got royalties coming in from the book that he made in 1979, still. His house is paid off. He's just sitting on his porch, making Star Trek photo montage comics, because what else is he going to do? “I can walk the dog today, or I can make this photo montage comic. I think I'll make the photo montage comic today and walk the dog tomorrow.” That's the only thing that makes sense to me, Dave.

[48:12] Dave: Yeah. I mean, I think it absolutely is that, and I do think that also, me evoking Henry Darger is, I think it is that, too, where there's the compulsion. The obsessive monastic ritual of making comics has to be fueled somewhere. So, if it's not fueled into actually drawing them, “I'm going to get up every day, and I'm going to look through this fucking episode of Tribbles to find the specific William Shatner hand shape,” or whatever.

[48:39] David: That makes perfect sense, to me.

[48:40] Dave: John Byrne isn't dead yet. So, we could still get new Star Trek: New Vision Season 2.

[48:47] David: I think I might read more after we've had this talk, and I don't know.

[48:53] Dave: Honestly, just read Issue #18. Just read #18. The ending’s fucking dumb. #22 sucks. They're all bad, but just read #18, so you can see the weird K-Y Jelly.

[49:06] David: And with that, everybody, thanks for joining us on the deep dive in Star Trek: New Visions. Dave, thank you for all your hard work, putting this together, and doing the Herculean task of reading 22 double-sized issues of John Byrne photomontage comics. You are a legend, sir.

[49:31] Dave: Thank you for having me. This was super fun.

[49:33] David: The Kickstarter with this essay, as well as a bunch of other work by a bunch of really smart creative talent, is available now. It's The Comics Courier. So, just get on Kickstarter and search it. We'll try to make sure to put a link in the show notes. So, thanks, everybody, for coming. See you next time on The Corner Box. Bye.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates and links at www.thecornerbox.club and we’ll be back next week with more from David and John, here at The Corner Box.