So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

Anyone who's ever come over to the house or had a beer with me somewhere or talked to me at a con or has traded emails with me knows I love STAR TREK. I'm all O.V. about TOS; loved the TNG. I know what those access tunnels they're always crawling through are called and I know who they're named after. I know as many words in Marc Okrand's Klingon as I do in French, and I'll bust out "magnatomic adhesion area" if you think you're all that in an old-school tête étêté with me about the show.

Noted scamp Rich Johnston even scored a picture of me twenty-nine years ago dressed up in a handmade Starfleet uniform and Vulcan ears (which were a lot harder to get in rural Vermont in 1979 that you might imagine) standing in line opening night for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. I saw it eight or nine times before I realized it wasn't even that good of a movie.

I even wrote a special for MTV shot of the bridge of the Enterprise-D. So I have a little ST cred, and I'm a little snobby about the ancillary stories, the paperbacks, the comics, what-have-you. Jeez, I don't even like VOYAGER and I barely watched ENTERPRISE.

But as I guy who trims his sideburns into Academy points (or, for that matter, even knows that the pointed sideburns that everyone wears in the future are even CALLED "Academy points") once a year when he shaves off his Riker-esque beard... take it from me:

I love IDW's STAR TREK line.

Now, some of the alien anthology books are sort of placeholders, and the NEW FRONTIER story "Turnaround" (about a former member of the crew with godlike powers and the crew of a timeship after him) seems a little too close to "For the Time Being" from PROOF OF CONCEPT for me to really enjoy it as a fan. But David Messina's art on the Next Gen characters is just great, and I make sure to read all the ones he works on.

But the one that's really doing it for me lately is John Byrne's ASSIGNMENT: EARTH.

Like most STAR TREK fans, I love that episode, and after I saw THE ROOKIES get introduced on S.W.A.T., I realized what a "back-door pilot" was. Who wouldn't have wanted to see Robert Lansing and Teri Garr cavorting across late 60s television screens?

Seems as though ol' JB has been thinking the same thing all these years, and has gotten Ted Adams to open the purse strings, because we're in the middle of what's been touted as the spin-off that didn't get made. And can I tell you?

It's awesome.

I know I'm breaking an unwritten rule of mine by even talking about comics here, because, you know, one assumes that if I write and letter and produce and publish comics, chances are very high I got some enthusiasm for the form, yeah? So taking time away from work and play to write up a quick column about comics I like seems a little water's-wet.

But dang if I don't have to say thanks to IDW and CBS and Big John for putting out this comic. Robert Lansing looks like Robert Lansing, Teri Garr looks like... well, a blonde John Byrne girl, but, still. He gets the clothes right and the cadence of the characters, and it's in service of a story you actually care about what happens. The first issue, about a Soviet spy sent to sabotage a US bomb test is a sort of by-the-numbers thing (which actually works for the time, as you'd imagine this'd be the sort of story that'd be told on network TV in the late 60s)... and yet ends so brutally, I sort of couldn't believe what I was reading.

The second issue FORREST GUMPs the ASSIGNMENT: EARTH characters back to the Enterprise for the events of the ST ep "Tomorrow is Yesterday," which, due to the peculiarities of time travel, happens after "Assignment: Earth" for Seven and Roberta, but before "Assignment: Earth" for the Enterprise crew.

Trust me, that sentence made sense to a STAR TREK fan.