New Visions is a unique series of
Star Trek: The Original Series comics created by John Byrne and published by IDW, starting in 2013. Each issue is painstaking created using stills from the television series, to create new episodes in comic-book form, using all the original actors, sets, props and more, exactly as they appear on-screen. The books are perfect bound, and also about twice the length of a typical comic, with each issue normally featuring a forty-two page story (a few have comic in slightly longer or shorter).
The series began as an experiment on Byrne's part, who set out to create a photo-comic adaptation of the first aired
TOS episode,
The Man Trap. Realising he had hit on something, Byrne then began to work on an original story, and soon enough IDW picked up the idea, with the first story published as a one-off annual (IDW's first
Star Trek annual in fact). The series gained it's title in the second story, issue one of
New Visions, although later reprints of the annual also used the
New Visions title.
New Visions became IDW's second ongoing
Star Trek comic series (following the
nuTrek series), and is released on a roughly bimonthly basis; although has been subject to frequent shuffling on the release schedule that has led to it not quite keeping up to that release frequency.
As the series has progressed so has Byrne's technique, while early issues typically used sets as available from screencaps, Byrne quickly began to expand his options by creating new CGI environments, ships, and even characters. Similarly his photo-manipulations have become ever more complex as he seeks to create unique scenes with characters and poses that do not exist straight from the screen. Occasionally Byrne has also made use of new photography to add in guest characters using new actors.
The list below is of all the
New Visions issues, in release order. In addition to the individual issues, the
second omnibus book of the series also features a bonus story,
Eye of the Beholder, in which Captain Kirk visits both the Gold Key and
TAS realities.
Annual: Strange New Worlds
#1: The Mirror, Cracked
- Notes: First issue of the New Visions series, and a sequel to the original mirror universe episode, Mirror, Mirror.
- Published: May 2014.
- Coverage: First panels, more panels, Klingon interiors, title and tease page, panel breakdown and virtual sets, ongoing series, author comments and virtual set, solicitation cover and blurb, press release and updated cover, excerpt.
- Purchase: Amazon.com, Things From Another World, iTunes.