Hot off the series premiere, IDW Publishing has (via Nerdist) announced the first comics series for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, titled Lost Contact. Written by Layne Morgan (Legacies), with art by newcomers Coralí Espuna and Nora Serrano, the five-issue series will pick up after the first season finale, and see the show’s young leads find themselves stranded on a supposedly uninhabited planet, where they wind up making first contact instead.
Caleb, Genesis, Jay-Den, Kyle, and Tarima are all students of Starfleet Academy, the illustrious school responsible for the Federation’s best. One day, they dream to serve as great leaders on board ships of their own, to study the cultural intricacies of sentient life amongst the Galaxy, or to go where no person has explored before. But today, their mission is simply to execute a survey simulation on a lifeless, low-oxygen planet. Or at least, it seems simple… until a huge storm cuts off their contact with their teachers aboard the Athena… and something impossible appears: an alien. Now, they’ll have to work together and use everything they’ve learned in class about first contact to make it off the planet alive!
The book marks Morgan’s second comics credit, after Glarien & Thane. She states, “It’s such an honor to be able to play around in the massive Star Trek universe. I think that’s been the most exciting part for me. This is my first time getting to work on a really big IP like this, and getting to do so in a world that is so rich with canon, fans, stories, and passion has been a dream. I love the kids of Starfleet Academy and absolutely loved getting to find little pieces of these new, already rich characters to explore in this story, and the setting and situation to do it in. I tried to find a real problem for them to face that felt like an homage to classic TV I grew up on and is hopefully one that Trek fans will enjoy for that reason, too.”
For more from Morgan and editor Cassandra Jones, head to Nerdist. For the record, the very first Starfleet Academy comic, which was a Deep Space Nine tie-in, was published by Marvel from 1996 to 1998, while IDW’s first, set in the timeline of J.J. Abrams‘s films, was released in 2016. Kerrice Brooks‘s hologram student SAM is noticeably absent from the synopsis, raising the question of what will happen to her during the first season.
Issue #1 will be released on April 15, a month after the first season finale releases on Paramount+ on Thursday, March 12. It will have a main cover by Espuna, and retail incentive (1:25) variant by Liana Kangas featuring Jay-Den and Genesis. In the meantime, the first three episodes of the show are available now.
