“The Long Night’s Dawn!” (22 pages)
Writer: Mike W. Barr
Penciler: Ed Hannigan
Inkers: Tom Palmer & Dave Simons
Letters: Rick Parker & Harry Blumfield
Colors: Carl Gafford
Editor: Al Milgrom
Editor-in-chief: Jim Shooter
Cover artist: Walter Simonson
Now, that’s a cover!
And it’s no surprise that it comes from Walter Simonson, one of the great comic book artists of all time. This could have been a fill-in piece or pinup that was looking for a slot and Al Milgrom was wise enough to use it. Since it’s in the poster genre of cover art and could have run with pretty much any issue of Star Trek.
Also, I can’t imagine anyone on the editorial side of things at Marvel enjoyed that front-page ad mucking up the cover layout.
Overall, this is a much better issue. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s a near masterwork of competence compared with the previous issues.
The Enterprise has been diverted to the planet Goran IV, where a Federation satellite that had been monitoring its star has fallen into the planet’s atmosphere. It burned up, but its fuel was released and is interacting with the planet’s atmosphere in way that will soon make it toxic to the people living there. They need to run a covert landing party to ensure the antidote they carry will work, though, before deploying it. So Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down in disguise to carry out that part of the mission.
All of this is classic Trek plot. What makes it work is Barr and Hannigan’s collaboration. The thick exposition is effectively played out over a nicely restrained splash page, and particularly nice double-page splash that brings some of the movie’s widescreen scale to the comic.
By Page 4, the landing part has beamed down to a forest, their arrival observed by a girl who believes them to be angels and follows them into a town that evokes Europe in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance period.
The latter period is more explicitly evoked when an old man named Gorman bumps into Kirk and Spock, dropping scrolls that show diagrams of the planet’s solar system. The old man grabs the scrolls and runs off.
Then the authorities arrive in the form of Clerics, who serve the Cathedral, and they’re looking for Gorman. Suspicious of Kirk and Spock’s interaction with them, a fight breaks out, and Spock is knocked out. His hood is pulled back to reveal his ears, and he’s declared, of course, a devil.
McCoy meanwhile has found a local hospital. He finds one, though he thinks little of it, given that they refuse on religious grounds to relieve the pain. He surreptitiously scans a patient and learns the atmospheric toxin is affecting the population as expected. He tests out the antidote on one patient, and it starts to work immediately — but he’s been caught by the Clerics and taken prisoner.
The Clerics collect all the tools taken from McCoy, Kirk and Spock, and smash them to bits with a hammer. They then discover the little girl has been watching them, and try to catch her. She escapes, grabbing a pile of the wrecked equipment before Gorman helps her escape into the tunnels under the Cathedral.
Gorman and the girl find Kirk and Spock, but can’t unlock the door. They give them the remains of their equipment as it’s all they have.
Back on the Enterprise, they’re nervously awaiting word from the missing landing party, even as the toxins in the air begin to take effect and people start getting ill.
Spock uses a wire from the remains of a communicator to saw through the bolt of their prison door. They try and fail to free McCoy, and escape to find the girl waiting to take them to Gorman.
Spock stays with Gorman to try to signal the ship to use the antidote, admiring the primitive but scientifically useful astronomical equipment in the old man’s lab. The girl takes Kirk to save McCoy, who is scheduled to be tested as a witch at dawn. Spock uses a nerve pinch on Gorman, and sets to work building a device that can contact the Enterprise.
McCoy is set to be dunked into the river to see if he dies or his sorcery will save him. Once under the water, Kirk swims up to him, cuts him free, and they float down river a ways to get away from the Clerics. They come ashore, and the Clerics come after them after seeing McCoy got away and therefore truly must be a witch.
The toxin really kicks in, and the Clerics as well as Kirk and McCoy start to succumb to its effects.
On the Enterprise, Uhura is surprised to receive a primitive signal from Spock, telling them to drop the antidote into the atmosphere. Scotty makes it so, and the antidote quickly does its job.
Kirk and McCoy wake at Gorman’s place with the girl and Spock, who explains he was able to use the materials in Gorman’s lab along with wiring from the wrecked equipment to create a crude radio transmitter and order the antidote dropped.
McCoy gives the girl, whose name we finally learn is Lori, a little vitamin shot to clear up a muscle ailment that made it hard for her to walk. She’s grateful, and Spock tells Gorman to keep up the good work, and then they beam up to end another issue.
Barr writes a solid story in the Star Trek style, something he’d do with much more fanfare at DC a few years after this issue came out. It’s the equivalent of a standard episode of Star Trek, which other writers have shown is not an easy mark to hit. It also has good logic, not much fat to it, the characters all behave like themselves, and the script has the right tone and avoids going off into Stan Lee territory. (Stan was still the most admired writer at the time — most Marvel writers tried to emulate him in some fashion, at least until Chris Claremont’s X-Men and Frank Miller’s Daredevil grabbed the industry’s imagination and bottom line by the short hairs — and never let go.)
This issue draws on a lot of coincidences, but does it a thousand times more effectively than the previous one. The bit with Gorman as a Galileo analog is very on the nose, but still works reasonably well. Same with the little girl who saves the day, and the many speeches about how this race will, like humans, evolve out of superstition into a logical and scientific understanding of the universe. Maybe the analogous time period isn’t early Renaissance Europe, but 2022 America.
This is much closer to the quality level that was consistently delivered when DC Comics took over the Star Trek license, about three years away from this point. This issue would have gone on sale in August 1981, so it was still a ways out from when filming began on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in November of that year. Perhaps if Marvel had a glimpse of what was coming with Star Trek, they might not have canceled this series.
The art is quite good on this issue, though there’s a clear distinction between the first eight pages, which were inked by Palmer, and the rest of the issue, where Simons gives things a scratchier feeling. Hannigan was a real comic book work horse in the 1980s — what some might call a “jobber,” though I dislike how much that term brushes very talented artists who regularly delivered above-average work. Hannigan’s work wasn’t in the same league as a George Perez, John Byrne, or Neal Adams, but I always find plenty to admire and a solid sense of storytelling in the books he draws.
I remember putting this run together at various points in the 1990s. Whenever I’d run across an issue I needed, I’d pick it up. This ended up being the last issue I needed, and no place I looked had it in stock. It ended up being one of the first comics I ordered from on online retailer, from Mile High Comics, back in 1996 or 1997. Their prices were much more affordable at the time.
And with that, there’s only one more issue to go.
