The Parker Project

I picked this up and read it without having seen issue #1.  It worked fine that way.  The situation was clear and the story didn’t feel like a fragment I was coming into the middle of.

While I’ve been dissapointed by John Byrne’s reduced effort in his artwork, this book seems to have just a bit of his passion restored.  It’s still not drawn with the love that you see in his old Fantastic Four comics.  But that was decades ago.

And what he does put work into here comes off very well.  The setting of Star Trek: The Original Series is presented faithfully without ever feeling campy or dated.  That’s quite a feat to pull off.

It’s also interesting to see an idea of what a ship should look like that’s “old” in this futuristic setting.  The ship that is the setting of much of the story is 50 years old and considered to be outdated.  Byrne shows this with a slightly blocky design that is consistent with Starfleet style but suceeds in looking its age.

The story moves along with deliberate speed and involves the reader quickly.  Admittedly not a lot of time is given to character development.  But the main character’s personality comes out during the action.

The first part of the story seems to be a mundane maintenance mission with a complication.  This is also a refreshing thing to see.  It’s nice to focus on a corner of the Trek universe that doesn’t involve star-spanning political complications.  (Not that I have anything against star-spanning political complications.  Those are wonderful too.)

It feels like Byrne is having fun, not just earning a paycheck.  And that’s nice to see.

I’ll go back and read issue #1 now.  This issue ends with a suggestion that it will continue this storyline.  I’d love to see Byrne do a book like this that is mainly self contained stories, even switching characters, ships, locations, from issue to issue, but fleshing out the lower ranked members of Starfleet.