Legendary Writer to Pen New Star Trek Series

This is an official IDW press release:

San Diego, CA (March 4, 2008)-The Star Trek franchise is about to become even more legendary as an all-star roster of talent is coming together to produce a new series continuing the chronicles of the Starship Enterprise's untold fourth year. Star Trek Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment will be co-written by D.C. Fontana, who started her career as assistant to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and has authored some of Star Trek's most celebrated episodes.

Joining Fontana for her first-ever foray into comic book storytelling will be veteran Star Trek artist Gordon Purcell, whose work has appeared in more than 50 issues of Star Trek dating back to the 1980s, up to and including his most recent work for IDW. Purcell will be joined by longtime collaborator Terry Pallot on inks, with Derek Chester, a veteran of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine® and Star Trek video games, collaborating with Fontana on the story and script. Fan-favorite illustrators The Sharp Brothers will provide covers for the entire five-part series.

The Enterprise Experiment represents the second series of IDW's Star Trek: Year Four, which reveals the untold fourth year of the U.S.S. Enterprise's legendary five-year mission, depicted for just three seasons on the original Star Trek show.

For The Enterprise Experiment, Fontana and Chester have crafted a sequel to Fontana's celebrated Star Trek episode "The Enterprise Incident", in which Kirk famously posed as a Romulan to capture a new state-of-the-art cloaking device. In this all-new story, Federation efforts to fully adapt the cloaking device to Starfleet ships leads to an experiment gone awry, trapping Kirk and Spock on an Enterprise out of phase with space itself. At the same time, Romulan forces close in on the starship, intent on claiming revenge for their stolen technology. Later chapters in the series will provide a sequel to the first two issues, as the Klingon™ Empire-with its own agenda-suddenly enters the fray.

"The story is absolute classic Trek in the best sense of the word," says Andrew Steven Harris, Star Trek editor at IDW Publishing. "We're thrilled to have talent like this, people who've been working on Star Trek for decades. You can't find comic book storytellers who know these characters and settings more intimately."

Building on her early start with her Star Trek association, D.C. Fontana went on to write some of Star Trek's most memorable episodes, including ground-breaking episodes of the first series, as well as sharing credit with Roddenberry for the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation®. She also served as story editor for the entire run of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and contributed her talent to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine® as well. "D.C. Fontana is considered the grande dame of Star Trek writers," says Harris. "It's extraordinary to work with someone of her stature and quality. She's also got a perfect co-creator in Derek Chester, and the two of them together have been turning in some of the best Star Trek scripts that we've seen here."

The first monthly issue of Star Trek Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment goes on sale in April, with a retail price of $3.99

© C Harris Lynn, 2008