Review–Star Trek/Green Lantern #1, a well-executed crossover opener

Who doesn’t like a good crossover series?

This month IDW Publishing, the licensee holder for Star Trek comics, and DC Comics teamed up to release the first issue of Star Trek/Green Lantern: The Spectrum War. The burden of any crossover is successfully combining two well-known worlds in a way that is true to them both, while forging ahead on a combined path that makes them better together. It’s a tall order with Star Trek and Green Lantern. Yet, writer Mike Johnson and artists Angel Hernandez get this new series not only off on a good start, they created a fun read true to their source material that will keep readers around for Issue #2.

First, they made an interesting choice of players. They combined the new, Star Trek reboot crew with the classic, original lantern, Hal Jordan. We don’t get a big dose of Hal in issue #1, but the mannerisms of the crew from the 2009 movie and Star Trek Into Darkness are spot on. With Hernandez’s renderings of the actors behind each character the result is a seamless believable blend of worlds. Even better, they select one of the top five all-time best Star Trek villains for their first bad encounter.

The story begins with a Watcher from the DC Universe and a quick fantasy set-up as true to the classic Hal stories as you’d find anywhere. Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk and Karl Urban’s Doctor McCoy couldn’t be better–both as their new incarnations and in their play on the original 1960s versions of themselves. That sounds strange, but read it, it really works and it’s really well done. A villainous vessel, and a handful of power rings, and BAM! We have the set up for a solid series here.

We also get to see more of Scotty and his accusatory red shirt sidekick. We can also expect to see at least one classic villain from Hal’s world, and an infamous orange lantern, previewed on the cover of a coming issue.

Whenever you combine not only properties but publishers as with The Spectrum War, you know you’re going to get some buzz, and the publishers didn’t miss a beat by coming up with about two dozen variant covers for the first issue. Comic book monthlies have been inundated with variant covers this year. In this case, the first issue catches up to the hype, and the variants also mean it will be easy for you to grab a copy of Issue #1 before Issue #2 arrives in August.