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REVIEW: Star Trek Alien Spotlight: Borg
Star Trek Alien Spotlight: Borg
Review by Dave Baxter, posted January 28, 2008
Words: Andrew Steven Harris
Pencils: Sean Murphy
Inks: Sean Murphy
Colors: Leonard O'Grady
Release Date: January 23, 2008
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Price: $3.99
My name officially rests on the IDW “comp list”, meaning I get a little package from them every few weeks, filled with comics to read and review. Often, the books are right up my alley, original GN’s or stand-alone minis, though on occasion something truly random arrives, most notably books that are a part of another brand-name universe I have never (or at least not in recent memory) kept up with. Thus was the case with Star Trek Alien Spotlight: Borg , a one shot taking place inside an ever-expanding franchise I’d never been a fervent follower of, my exposure limited to a smattering of Next Generation episodes and, of course, the entirety of the theatrically-released films. But here, lo, there be a Star Trek tale; it’d be fun, I thought, maybe even exciting, though it was a standard-sized one-shot cranked out by two creative types wholly unknown to me, so…best to keep my expectations in royal check.
Holy sufferin’ shaitan—twenty minutes later, as I lay the comic down measuredly, into my lap; as my eyes darted absent-mindedly about, witless, punch-drunk, completely suspicious that reality wasn’t, in fact, what I’d just witnessed it to be (it couldn’t be. I mean…it just couldn’t ); I thought to myself: it was. I read the issue again, just to be sure, and sure enough, it gave a repeat performance, which is to say…well…damn it, words fail. It was...really, really smart. That shouldn’t be such an implausible virtue, but it is. The story was supernaturally aware of the intricacies involved in each of its long-established characters, and was paced at a rare tempo, a rhythm that allowed for jaw-dropping, epic-as-epic-gets events to take place inside a comparably miniscule space without once, not for a single panel, reading as though anything beyond a clash of character philosophies.
Andrew Steven Harris is the man behind the brilliance, an editor for IDW’s Star Trek line, and like Roy Thomas back in the Marvel heyday of Conan, Harris not only knows his Trek, but he understands it as well, through-and-through, penning a tale as philosophically complex as any an Isaac Asimov Foundation novel, centered around mind-numbingly hard-SF conceits a la Primer, and speared through the middle with the terrifying threat of the ultimate Star Trek baddy—the Borg.
The story opens with a bang: a number of Federation ships obliterated, each at the precise moment they access their warp drives. Geordi LaForge is aboard one of the ships, and survives only by grace of his cybernetic implants part-assimilating a Borg infestation that then swarms throughout his body. Now, clued-in that the Borg are behind the inexplicable attacks, Admiral Janeway announces that the crisis is one long foreseen: the Borg are systematically moving backward through time, altering history into a perfectly Borg-triumphant one, the shockwave that precedes such a time distortion destabilizing all other attempts at similar warping of time and space.
To say that what comes next would ruin it…honestly? I don’t think it’s possible to summarize the story in any thoroughly understandable way. It’s intricate, and nuanced, and blasts through ideas and activity as though they were simply obstacles in the way of the comic itself. It’s as if Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison teamed up to write a Star Trek yarn only both having learned, somewhere down the line, how to write a story of honest-to-god sincerity . The wildness of Ellis and Morrison are here, as are their inordinate perception of plot and purpose, though Harris one-ups nearly every comic scribe alive by never missing a beat of authentic humanity, not for a single seqeuntial. There’s no empty posturing here, no unexplored avenues in favor of unnecessary conflict or misunderstandings or whatever the melodramatic cliché. This is a story that feels real. And it’s extraordinarily clever to boot.
If that weren’t enough of a heart-stopper, Harris is flanked by newcomer Sean Murphy, whose pages seethe with carefully construed power. The characters are the perfect balance 
between cartoon caricatures and stand-alone comic designs. The faces of the famous folk: Picard, Geordi, Janeway, Data (to name but a few) are instantly recognizable, but they aren’t just facsimiles—they’re solid comic characters with a range of expression and posture and action. Murphy furthermore manages a thrilling number of near-cinematic suspense sequences, presenting the slow-burn drama of the events in a way that seems spontaneous, though such effect (which isn’t, in the end, an affect), is one of the most difficult things to generate in fiction.
What else can I say but…I’m flabbergasted. By the skill in which this one-shot was crafted and by the complete lack of reverberation it's made within the industry at large. This is a hallmark in comics, all comics, every comic; it’ll be criminally overlooked, especially as I fear that most reviewers, like me, although liable to praise the book for being a stunning surprise, will find themselves too busy being stunned to do more than muse quietly on how the book managed such pleasant impact. I don’t know if there’ll be a better single issue from any other comic book this year, even if we are only in January. There certainly wasn’t one last year.
No one’s likely to notice this one, but it is what it is, and what it is will stand, just like every falling tree will make one helluva sound, no matter who isn’t around to witness it.
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