This January and February, we’ll be finishing up our look at the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and moving on to the third year of the show, both recently and lovingly remastered for high definition. Check back daily for the latest review.
We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.
One of the biggest problems that the writing staff had on Star Trek: The Next Generation was the insistence that the show was episodic. Themes and characters were rarely carried from week to week. Occasionally, a plot point or character might recur, but the bulk of the show was intentionally designed to be readily accessible in just about any order imaginable. In the era of HBO and “televisual novels”, this approach seems quite quaint, but it was very much the reality of late eighties and early nineties television.
However, there were no such restrictions on comic book story telling. Far from downplaying continuity and long-term plotting, mainstream American comics pride themselves on their serialised nature. It’s quite common for characters to suddenly reappear after absences of considerable time, and for writers to make callbacks to events that occurred decades ago. Publishing twelve issues a year, typically from the same author, The Next Generation comic book did afford the opportunity for a slightly different type of storytelling.
All set…
And, to be fair, that was one of the strengths of Michael Jan Friedman’s approach to The Next Generation comic book. He was fond of focusing on supporting characters, or giving page space to characterisation, or even basking in the show’s continuity in a way that wasn’t possible on television. Sure, Friedman could occasionally get a little obsessive in his continuity references, and could occasionally have difficulty tying everything into a cohesive story, but this was one way the author capitalised on the shift in the medium.
The Lesson is a single-issue story that is all the more intriguing for essentially existing as a series of character moments, with little in the way of an over-arching plot. The writing is a little clumsy and on-the-nose, with the comic earnestly offering its readers a rather ham-fisted message of the week, but it’s notable for the way that Friedman seems to bask in the freedom afforded to him by virtue of the fact that he’s writing a comic book (rather than an episode) of The Next Generation.
They’ve really bonded…
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Filed under: Comics, The Next Generation | Tagged: comic books, Comics, dc comics, Michael Jan Friedman, star trek, star trek: the next generation, the next generation | 2 Comments »
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