IDW Publishing appears to be pouring resources into its Star Trek license, announcing its fourth new Trek title in the last three months, and this latest one has some star power attached.
Star Trek: Defiant is a March 2023-launching ongoing series that features Worf assembling "a hand-picked crew to face a galaxy-spanning threat."
IDW describes the "dark and edgy" series as "The Dirty Dozen meets Star Trek" and stars Worf along with Spock, Data's malevolent 'brother' Lore, B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager, and while she isn't named in the announcement, that sure looks like the likeness of Michelle Forbes as Ensign Ro Laren on the cover.
The series is written by Chris Cantwell and illustrated by Ángel Unzueta.
In the series, someone is killing the gods…but while Benjamin Sisko and his own "Avengers"-like all-star Starfleet crew in the new ongoing flagship Star Trek series are facing threats in the "higher cosmos," there's a new threat in the "street-level" corner of the far future.
Worf puts together a crew of his own aboard the U.S.S. Defiant to combat a dangerous human messiah who leads a genocidal cult. According to the publisher, the fan-favorite Klingon unites "some of the strongest personalities in the franchise ... on a mission with very little guarantee of success!"
"Ever since I made my dad take me to my first Star Trek convention when I was ten, I have been waiting for this moment," says Cantwell in the series announcement.
"When Heather Antos, Jackson Lanzing, and Collin Kelly reached out to me about writing the first book to spin out of their flagship Star Trek title, I wanted the quality to match my massive wells of enthusiasm; I knew this book needed to be undeniably Star Trek first and foremost, but also something new and complex that would have readers leaning forward as they engaged with a more unexpected journey to the stars.
"Whereas the new Star Trek book carries forward the grand tradition of Starfleet's saga of discovery and exploration, Defiant immediately sets out to break the rules of the Federation and go on a fugitive run from Starfleet with a cast of Trek's best iconoclastic heroes and ne'er-do-wells, each of them straddling worlds in their identities and calibrations in their moral compasses as they embark on a high-stakes galactic manhunt…the Prime Directive be damned."
IDW, who will lose its Transformers and GI Joe license with Hasbro later this year, seems to be placing significant resources into the Star Trek license. Defiant will join the aforementioned new flagship Star Trek ongoing along with a Star Trek: Resurgence title that serves as a prequel to the video game, and the recently-announced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds series.
"To be part of this amazing new Star Trek universe is a big challenge, and I love big challenges," says Unzueta. "It will be very exciting to show how far our crew can go to save the universe, how many rules they can break just to make things right, how 'badass' these guys can be when compared to the more clean-cut crew of the Theseus from the ongoing series."
"Just when you thought Star Trek comics couldn't get any bigger, we're continuing to boldly explore new frontiers," says senior editor Heather Antos. "Between the flagship title and Defiant, it's safe to say that we have comics' biggest Trek fans—Lanzing, Kelly, Cantwell, Rosanas, and Unzueta themselves—crafting what is going to be Star Trek's biggest and boldest interconnected comics story ever. And this is only just the beginning!"
Star Trek: Defiant #1 goes on in March with variant covers by Unzueta, Malachi Ward, Declan Shalvey, David Aja, and Daniel Warren Johnson.
Star Trek is getting a new lease at IDW just before Transformers and GI Joe leave the publisher at the end of 2022.
