The 23rd century had some crazy fashion. The Bob Fletcher spigot continues to flow with this billowy, bright blue nylon number that’s sure to make you stand out in a crowd. Reader Rene Quebec reminded me that Gary Coleman wore a very similar outfit in the Buck Rogers TV show. So…

Darren Franich’s Wrath of Khan retro-review was just posted on Entertainment Weekly’s site. His Motion Picture review was spot on, but, for me, the TWOK one lacked a critical edge to it. Even the best films have an Achilles Heal. It’s been 34 years. Certainly if one can find something positive about TMP then they can also find something negative in TWOK besides the uniforms. For me it’s the characterization of Kirk.

Kirk is gravely misunderstood by Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer. Where did they come up with this idea that Kirk never faced death? Kirk was on Tarsus IV where he saw half the population murdered by Governor Kodos. He lost his brother to space pancake monsters in Operation:Annihilate. He blamed himself for the crippling of the U.S.S. Farragut and the death of her captain. He buried his best friend alive. He held McCoy back as Edith Keeler was hit by a truck. He mourned every damn redshirt as if they were his own kid. Remember him scooping up the powdered remains of Yeoman Thompson in By Any Other Name? Kirk has never tricked his way out of death and patted himself on the back for it. Never. He’s faced it head on again and again. Even Claudius admires Kirk’s ability to face his own death and the death of his crew in Bread and Circuses.

TWOK created an image of Kirk as some kind of irresponsible man-child that couldn’t deal with reality until he lost his best friend. A best friend, by the way, that he had previous blinded, taunted, beat up, seen fatally wounded, and ordered to his apparent death more times than I can count. And when that friend’s only way out of a marriage contract was Kirk’s own demise he accepted it. It was McCoy who gave Kirk the neuro-paralyzer in secret. Kirk didn’t ask for an easy way out. The only way Kirk’s ever cheated death was in having the sense to say “energize and detonate” instead of the other way around.

I don’t think Nadifa knows who Brody is, exactly, but sometimes it just takes one to know one. The look of these two characters, like all my characters, was inspired by actual people. I find the best way to escape the artistic trap of everyone looking the same but with different hair is to draw from life. Every face is a caricature. In the case of Brody I was interested in a Mayan look which shows in her face and her clothing. For Nadifa I wanted a very serious, sleek, ebony skinned model. These aren’t exact portraits, but certainly recognizable inspirations.

Ensign Shapiro and Cadet Aslan (as I know them in my head) were born out of a search for “Israeli soldier” and “Turkish Soldier”. In Aslan’s case the person was just a background blur, but his clearly visible flat bangs, round cheeks, and pencil line beard were just what I wanted: A boyish metrosexual in fatigues.

Sometimes a post doesn’t fit under “News” or “Concept Art”. You know, like a rant about flat cats or a Molly Ringwald poll. That’s why everything’s been consolidated under the new “Blog” section. This should not effect old links to previous posts from either section, just the place you’ll find them. And, as always, you can use the search bar to find just about anything.

Stupid Internet poll time! I know who I’d pick. How about you?

Yeah, I said it. Wanna make something of it?

Time’s Refuge has its own page in the Archive now. You can use it for quickly reading through the strips without constantly clicking the next button. Also remember, if you want to remember what some of these characters did in past comics you can type their names in the search bar. Try it!

As Basis of Proof ends I need to prime you all a bit for the next serial, Time’s Refuge. This comic, as stated in the About Section, does not follow the events in Enterprise at all and avoids much of what happened in DS9, Voyager, and even post fifth season TNG. That’s not to disparage those properties as good entertainment or to say that they aren’t “real Star Trek” – that is not the kind of discussion I ever want to have. They just aren’t my personal idea of where TOS came from and how it would evolve.

It’s important to remember this going into the next story because it will be predominantly set in the 31st century. There are no time ships in my version of events, nor is there a Temporal Cold War, and I wouldn’t even try to guess what letter revision the 1701 is, if it even exists.

My goal will be to make a 3rd 4th millennium that is as utterly alien as an era 700 years in Trek’s future should be while still linking it to Star Trek as we know it in some very obvious and appreciable ways. Basically, I have to figure out what the future of the future would look like from a 1960/1980’s perspective with a little 2010’s thrown in.

The original character guide for Basis of Proof! I didn’t realize until I had them all laid out that only one of them is wearing the standard duty uniform.

Here’s a timeline I created for the current storyline when it was about halfway through. Sometimes it’s good to visualize things just to make sure they work out the way you need them to – especially in a ticking time bomb type situation. The speed of the Hood’s secondary hull was calculated as something realistically attainable that would get her to at least the equivalent of a medium Earth orbit when the pod ruptured. That would probably be the bare minimum safe distance if you accept that the Enterprise was in low orbit when it was hit by the shock waves produced by a much smaller portion of antimatter in Obsession.