In Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds—The Scorpius Run #1 (of 5)

Synopsis: Set course with Captain Pike and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise to the Scorpius constellation! As they venture into the unknown, the Enterprise crew learn what it truly means to traverse through the strange and unfamiliar when they lose contact with Starfleet and find themselves trapped in unexplored space!

The Story

While setting out to explore the Scorpius constellation. Captain Pike and the crew of the Enterprise find themselves lost in the constellation. As they try to find a way out of the system they pick up a distress call from an unknown alien vessel and meet a mysterious alien called Aisla who says she can help them get out of the Scorpius Constellation, but needs the Enterprise to take her to a crime boss called Zephyx to pay her debt to him.

As the Enterprise arrives at Zephyx’s homeworld Pike and his crew are trapped and the only way they can get out of Zephyx’s grip is to enter a race known as the Scorpius Run. If they lose Zephyx will take their ship and destroy it. But if they win Zephyx will let the Enterprise and her crew go. However, Zephyx is not beyond changing the rules to try and ensure that he gets maximum entertainment from proceedings.

The Artwork

Angel Hernandez does a solid job of the artwork in this issue, which sees the artists have to create a host of new alien races that we have not seen before. Although the character of Zephyx looks like he may have been inspired by the Head in a Jar thing from Futurama only in this case. Zephyx is a very big head in a very big jar, which suggests he has massive brain power to enable him to hold entire ships and crews hostage. In fact, it may even be Zephyx who is making the Scorpius Constellation so hard for aliens to navigate. But we’ll have to wait and see if that theory proves to be true. All of that said. The character of Zephyx is really well-drawn and interesting to look at.

Overall

Scorpius Run makes for a solid story, but thus far it’s not really proving to be that original. Races that take place in space have been done many times before across a fairly wide range of comic books. That said. The setup for the story is done fairly well and it is early days as far as the story goes. So we’ll hopefully see some original twists come up in later issues.