by Edward Gross
Joe 90 merged with another British comic magazine called TV21, and Trek became TV21’s most popular title, expanding from two pages per issue to three—despite the TV show’s cancelation that same year. Another title change took place in 1971, following TV21 issue 105, when the comic merged with yet another magazine, Valiant, to become Valiant and TV21. Star Trek survived the merger, inhabiting the center two-page spread for another 118 issues until being dropped in 1973 (though Valiant continued publication for another three years, sans Trek). In total, the British Trek strips ran for five years, which is amazing when you consider that the TV show hadn’t even aired in Britain when the strips began.
Ten years later, U.S. fans received their own Star Trek comic strips. Distributed by the L.A. Times Syndicate, the daily newspaper strip chronicled the Enterprise’s post–The Motion Picture adventures and depicted a new five-year mission. The syndicate retained the immensely talented Thomas Warkentin as the inaugural writer and artist. The series was well received—at least, by the small handful of readers who even knew it existed, since most newspapers unfortunately declined to run it.
The British strips are actually pretty well drawn, sometimes beautifully so, even though they are wildly inaccurate. The American strips, on the other hand, are mostly well written, though the artwork ranges from excellent to … well, something a good deal less than excellent. The British strips ran almost entirely in color, while the American series was in black-and-white for all but the Sunday strips, which were in color.
As with the early Gold Key comics, the writers and artists for the Joe 90 and TV21 iterations had little knowledge of the TV series, and thus based their scripts and artwork on whatever limited reference materials they were provided by Paramount. As a result, the Enterprise’s interiors look nothing like those on the TV show, the uniform colors are frequently wrong, the weaponry and spaceships look like something out of Lost in Space or pulp sci-fi novel covers, the Klingons and Romulans look nothing at all like Klingons or Romulans, and the cast—including Spock—constantly utter melodramatic and space-y phrases like “G-g-great suffering galaxies!” Also, adherence to the TV show’s concepts is practically nonexistent, with Kirk (called “Captain Kurt” in early issues) and company acting and speaking wildly out of character. Some of the tales are actually pretty engaging, featuring stunning artwork that helps to make up for most of the plots being B-movie clichés. If nothing else, there’s a great MST3K enjoyment one can take from making fun of them.
The U.S. strips, however, are a different story. Warkentin was not only an immensely talented writer and artist, but also clearly a Star Trek fan. He brought back Harry Mudd, introduced McCoy’s ex-wife, created Klingon characters with great depth, and showcased a number of aliens and concepts from the TV show as well as from The Motion Picture and even The Animated Series. His successors, writer Sharman DiVono and artist Ron Harris, continued this trend, contributing a Kzinti story cowritten by Kzinti creator Larry Niven, introducing Admiral Nogura’s grandson, and crafting a wonderful adventure about a hive-mind machine species called the Omnimind that predated the Borg by half a decade.
The series’ final writer and illustrator, Gerry Conway and Dick Kulpa, also turned in a number of solid tales, particularly one in which Kirk and McCoy resign from Starfleet to become privateers, and another in which the Enterprise crew enters a parallel universe in which Star Trek is just a twentieth-century TV show. The U.S. strips are a gem, both in terms of writing and artwork, and anyone who hasn’t read them is missing out on some genuinely good Star Trek.
The perfect storm of events in the world of Star Trek continued in its third season, when, on March 1, 1969 (just a couple of weeks before the show would all but finish its network run; the final show, “Turnabout Intruder” wouldn’t air until June 3 because of an earlier preemption due to the death of President Eisenhower), the first “convention” devoted to the show was held at the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library. Hosted by Sherna Comerford and Devra Langsham, there were reportedly three hundred people in attendance (consider the notion of three hundred people descending on a library at once), and programming included a fan discussion on the Star Trek phenomenon, a slide show featuring images of the Enterprise sets and some of the aliens showcased on the show, Star Trek–inspired folk singing, and a talk by author Hal Clement on Star Trek and science. It all concluded with a skit by Sherna Comerford called “Spock Shock.”
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)
I wanted to go, but my mother didn’t want me to, although I did send one or two things over there. Here’s the problem I have with it, though: people call it the first Star Trek convention, but it wasn’t a convention. It was an afternoon at the library. It was a very nice afternoon, which had some local publicity. There were a couple of panels of Star Trek fans and it had a display of some items Sherna borrowed.
DEVRA LANGSHAM (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)
That was just a little group of us in Newark, because my friend Sherna lived there and we were able to get the library auditorium. We went, talked about Star Trek, and showed some pictures. The library people thought we were crazy. “This is a TV show.… You’re having a meeting to talk about a TV show?” There was a bit of that. Of course the hotel didn’t care as long as we paid the bills.
The hotel she references is the former Statler Hilton, currently the Hotel Pennsylvania, located across the street from New York City’s Penn Station. From January 21 to 23, 1972, it was the site where the first actual Star Trek convention—pulled together by a group of fans known as the Committee—was held, featuring such guest speakers as Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, Dorothy Fontana, David Gerrold, and Isaac Asimov. It was the first of what would eventually be thousands of Star Trek conventions to be held all over the world throughout the next several decades.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
The resurgence of Star Trek actually started with myself and a friend of mine, Devra Langsham. She was a children’s librarian, and we both had a pretty vast collection of thirty-five-millimeter Star Trek slides, which were stuff off the cutting-room floor. She used to put together slide shows for the library that she worked in; it was something she would do for the kids. While we had a large overlap, we each had a good selection of slides that the other didn’t have. So we were looking at the slides, and she had a couple of narratives that were fan-written that she was putting to them. After doing this for seven hours, you get a little loopy.
We were both members of the Lunarians, which was a fiction society, and they ran Lunacon, a fan-based science-fiction convention, once a year. I turned to her and said something like, “We ought to have a science-fiction convention for Star Trek,” and she replied, “Yeah, we can get five hundred of our closest friends”—which was just the kind of thing she used to say.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
Following a Lunacon, Elyse had come over to my house to help me with a slide project, and one of us said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a convention that was only for Star Trek people?” and three days later she called me and said, “We’ve got a hotel—the Statler Hilton—and a printer.” It was sort of, like, “What?” The printer, of course, would be for flyers. We had other people that we asked to help us, like setting up an art show. The whole thing was modeled very much on the standard science-fiction convention with panels and art shows and costume presentations.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Our original idea wasn’t a Star Trek convention, but a science-fiction convention with a major emphasis on Star Trek. We also had science-fiction panels, mostly on Sunday because the emphasis was on Star Trek.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
How did the concept of this convention “go viral” before Twitter and Facebook? It was Joan Winston, mostly. She worked in television management of contracts in New York and knew everyone in the media. And she could handle the media folks while not wasting their time. So she got the word out, and the fans who couldn’t get to New
York read about what happened and wanted to make their own—which they did.
Understand, the core groups here were mostly people who had run science-fiction conventions, so they knew how to put together a small event. It’s a whole profession, founding a small business, and then shutting down that small business and paying all the bills. Takes lawyers, accountants, logistics managers … in other words, it takes fans.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We talked to people and said, “We’d love to have your artwork exhibited,” and we had a dealers room which Phil Seuling ran. Nobody was worried at that point about whether Paramount had licensed them or not. They were fan-made things and Joan, through her contacts with the networks, invited the guests to come, and they came even though we didn’t pay them anything.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
One of the major differences in the conventions—and this is relevant—is that science-fiction fandom never advertised. Nobody ever put an ad out or flyer, except at other conventions. The only way you heard about conventions was through word-of-mouth. The World Science Fiction Convention that was held immediately prior to the first Star Trek convention had about a thousand to fifteen hundred people attending, which is a nice number.
We, on the other hand, did publicize it. We didn’t take an ad in the paper or anything, but we did call the networks, and we had two camera crews down there. ABC and CBS came down. NBC claimed they had too much news to cover to spare the crew. The long and short of it is that those networks, at least in local coverage, had stories about it. Not only did we get science-fiction fans who are Star Trek fans, but the public became aware of this event and they showed up.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We had people that we knew in the New York community help us, and Joan Winston, who worked at one of the networks as a secretary, got in touch with NASA and got us an exhibit, including a real space suit.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Joanie at the time knew everybody. She contacted NASA and asked if we could get some sort of exhibit, because this was 1972 and the space program was still going strong. They said yes and that the exhibit would be arriving in seven cartons to the hotel. Unfortunately, those cartons were actually crates. They fit into the freight elevator with about half an inch to spare. There was a mock-up of a space capsule and, among other things, a mannequin in a space suit, which she assumed was also a mock-up.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
That space suit was real, which over the course of the convention someone stole the arm off of. That was just dreadful.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Joanie apologized to someone at NASA, and that’s when we learned that it was real. We were mortified that it actually happened—there was a rope around it, but no glass barrier at that point. She had told them about the fun we had getting the crates in and out of the freight elevator, and they actually apologized to us.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
By the time we arrived ahead of the convention, we had between eight hundred and nine hundred preregistered people. We thought that was great; usually your preregistration doubled for the convention itself.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
We thought maybe fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred people would show up altogether. We had two thousand badges and two thousand program books. Apparently, as we discovered, when you advertise, you get more people. We ended up with about thirty-five hundred people showing up. Not all at once, thank goodness.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We ran out of everything. We ran out of name tags, we ran out of program books, we ran out of trivia contest sheets. I was printing them in my house on a mimeograph, and you don’t realize how long it takes to print two thousand things.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
We had the facility from eight a.m. Friday morning, but the convention didn’t start at eight a.m.—it started at two p.m. However, the hotel posted it in the lobby as eight a.m., which we didn’t realize because most of us came in Thursday night and stayed over. We weren’t in the lobby, and we were on the top floor of the Statler Hilton, where the convention was held. By ten a.m. we had no choice but to open registration, because the dealers were still setting up. It was a crazy day. It was a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday convention. By Sunday you were pretty much just letting people in, because there was no point. You’re going to charge them for coming in for two or three hours on a Sunday afternoon?
We had gotten a number of episodes of the show in thirty-five millimeter from Paramount, which were loaned to us for the duration of the convention. We had gotten waivers from the Screen Actors Guild that we didn’t have to pay royalties as long as nobody made any money on it. So what we had to do there was allow people to come in and watch the episodes without paying for membership into the convention. The films were run Friday and Saturday night and they were free. It was posted down in the lobby that if you wanted to come and watch it, you could.
We had a dinner on Saturday night for the Committee and our guests, and among them was Majel Barrett. The hallway was pretty quiet because everybody was in the main ballroom watching, I think, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” We were outside the ballroom, and you could hear virtually the entire audience quoting the lines along with the screen. She was astonished, because this was 1972 and the show had gone off the air in 1969. It was in reruns, but that was about it. They didn’t really appreciate how much of a loyal fan following they still had.
HOWARD WEINSTEIN (author; writer, Star Trek: The Animated Series)
When the first Star Trek convention happened in 1972, I was in college. I was a freshman at the University of Connecticut. Our winter-break vacation didn’t coincide with a lot of other schools, so most of my friends had gone back to college when the convention took place. I was still home, and I said, “Dammit, I’m not missing this Star Trek convention, I’m going to go by myself if I have to—there may not be another one.”
I went on Sunday, but they had run out of badges. I didn’t get a badge. I did get to see the big speakers, like Isaac Asimov and Gene and Majel. And I wandered through the dealers room, which was not big enough for the crowd. It was really wall-to-wall humanity. There was a relatively small ballroom area and a relatively small cordoned-off dealers area. It was packed. There was really no room to move without bumping somebody with your elbows. But it was great fun and just an amazing experience for everyone who was there. I feel really lucky that I went to the first convention.
ADAM MALIN (cofounder, Creation Entertainment)
I went to that 1972 show and it was amazing. Seeing Gene Roddenberry at that show was just unbelievable, and I remember sitting in the Penn Top Room, the eighteenth floor of the Statler Hilton. The room was packed with fans watching the classic blooper reels. I just could not believe it—I mean, to this day I think they were hysterical, but to see them then, in 1972, and to be surrounded by Star Trek fans was so amazing.
I realized that there was a Star Trek fan community just like there was for comic-book fans. I slowly began to realize that fandom was a growing, living thing. My peers in grade school and junior high school and high school, particularly the girls, really looked upon me as very dweebish for my interest in the genre. I was so excited about it and drawing pictures all the time and talking about monsters and aliens, and really quite a few of them saw me as eccentric and socially backward for my love of that.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
What separated Star Trek fans from other TV fans is that we really wanted to watch those things over and over. You would always rewatch the episodes, looking for more details and trying to fill in the blanks of this world they created, and that’s what led to people wearing costumes and really just participating.
It’s similar to Sherlock Holmes fans who do the same. Michael Chabon wrote a great essay about this, that popular fiction does this thing where it creates this world, and it doesn’t fill in the blanks, and that means that the fans want to. And that leads to, like when we were kids, self-published stories in fanzines or, today, Web sites. We wanted to pa
rticipate. And there was some way in which Star Trek really was the first television show to do that.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
These people were just happy to be there, which was true of science-fiction fans in general. People at the time who were real science-fiction fans, and who were aware of science fiction, but even people who weren’t, a lot of them were kind of outsiders to the mainstream. Most people were reading romance novels, most teenagers were reading about rock and all this other stuff. How many wanted to read about a speculative future? You don’t get that.
People who were interested in it were kind of outsiders, myself included. I always had a book in my hand. Still do. At that Star Trek convention, there was an acceptance of people, taking them at face value without dismissing them. It was a different frame of mind. That’s why that first convention had no trouble. Despite the number of people that were there, we didn’t have any fights. We didn’t have the kind of problems that would normally be associated in an overcrowding bunch of people.
The crowds would only get larger. In 1973, the Committee would move the convention to the Commodore, a much larger New York hotel, and invited guests James Doohan and George Takei, with Leonard Nimoy making a surprise appearance, much to the thrill of the sixty-two hundred attendees.
DAVID LANGHAUS (Star Trek fan)
I remember being really annoyed that Star Trek was canceled, despite sending letters to NBC each season, telling them how much I loved the show and my friends felt the same way. One of my friends told me there was going to be a Star Trek convention at the Commodore Hotel in NYC and did I want to go. I immediately said yes and got really excited. He said there would be some of the actors, but didn’t know which. It seemed fun and interesting to get all the fans together and find out what it would be like. Not many people knew what to expect. Naturally my folks felt I was wasting my time and money to go spend time with fans of a canceled TV show. Boy, were they wrong! It was very exciting from the moment we got there. A lot of the fans were wearing homemade uniforms, both Star Trek and sci-fi in general. I was sorry I was only in the period-traditional outfit of jeans and T-shirt.
