IDW PUBLISHING'S STAR TREK: SECOND STAGE

IDW Publishing on Wednesday announced Star Trek: Second Stage, its publishing line-up for Star Trek titles for 2008.

"We're incredibly proud of the work that we produced in our first year of Star Trek publishing, and the quality of those titles has really allowed us to recruit some of the best Star Trek storytellers from across several different mediums," said IDW Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall. "In the first year, we took the IDW starship on its shakedown cruise. For 2008, we're taking the storytelling beyond the Final Frontier."

"This will really be an epic year for Star Trek, and we want to make sure our books do justice to the scope of it all," IDW Star Trek editor Andrew Steven Harris, who together with Ryall conceived of and assembled the teams for Second Stage. "We're expanding our slate of titles to four issues a month, so that there's a feeling of weekly appointment reading for our audience, like a Star Trek TV show. At the same time, we want each title to have the significance of a Star Trek film, so that each series is a seminal comics event."

All Second Stage series will debut with a Star Trek: Second Stage logo. Titles launching in the opening months of include:

STAR TREK: NEW FRONTIER, March

Peter David, author of the first Star Trek series designed exclusively for print, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the New Frontier saga with its first comic book series. The five-part epic, debuting in March with artist Stephen Thompson, features new stories and the official continuation of the novels by Pocket Books.

In "Turnaround," the most dangerous experimental vessel in the galaxy -- a prototype time ship -- has vanished, and it appears that the man who stole it is none other than Starfleet Admiral Edward Jellico. Only Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the crew of the Excalibur have a hope of finding him before the ship, intended purely for scientific exploration, is used to disrupt the space-time continuum.

To mark the launch of Second Stage with New Frontier #1, IDW will debut its new Quad Cover format, with four separate covers bound directly onto the same issue.

STAR TREK YEAR FOUR: THE ENTERPRISE EXPERIMENT, April

D.C. Fontana, who started her career as Gene Roddenberry's assistant during the original series, went on to write some of Star Trek's most memorable episodes, including the first series, the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation and contributions to the Star Trek animated series and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Now Fontana adds Star Trek comic books to her legacy, continuing IDW's successful Star Trek Year Four saga with co-writer Derek Chester and artist Gordon Purcell. The Sharp Brothers will also contribute special covers for the five-part series.

The Star Trek Year Four series has chronicled the untold fourth year of the U.S.S. Enterprise's five-year mission, depicted for just three seasons on the original Star Trek show. For The Enterprise Experiment, Fontana and Chester craft a sequel to Fontana's celebrated episode "The Enterprise Incident," in which Kirk posed as a Romulan to capture a new state-of-the-art cloaking device.

In the new story, Federation efforts to fully adapt the cloaking device to Starfleet ships leads to an experiment gone awry, trapping Kirk and Spock on an Enterprise out of phase with space itself. At the same time, Romulan forces close in on the starship, intent on claiming revenge for their stolen technology.

Later chapters in the series will provide a sequel to the first two issues, as the Klingon Empire -- with its own agenda -- suddenly enters the fray.

STAR TREK: ASSIGNMENT EARTH, May

John Byrne provides a prequel to the Second Stage titles with the February finale of IDW's Alien Spotlight series in an issue showcasing the Romulans, the writer/artist's first-ever illustrated Star Trek story. In May, Byrne will unveil his first full-blown Star Trek comic series, the five-part, time-jumping Star Trek: Assignment Earth.

The original TV episode "Assignment Earth" had been the Season Two finale for the Star Trek series. It introduced the cryptic character Gary Seven and was intended by Gene Roddenberry as the pilot for a spin-off series that never came to pass. Byrne will bring Roddenberry's dream to life, delivering the spin-off 40 years after it would have debuted. The series tells the tale of the interstellar time traveler and his Earth-born assistant as they covertly confront threats to the past so that they can save Star Trek's future.

Byrne will both write and draw the series, which steps one year forward with each installment, beginning with 1968, the year that the original "Assignment Earth" episode aired.

STAR TREK: MIRRIOR IMAGES, June

The Mirror Universe remains one of the most popular themes in Star Trek canon, and IDW will travel through the looking glass with Star Trek: Mirror Images, written by IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall together with brothers Scott and David Tipton. The new four-part epic launches in June, teaming the brothers once again with Klingons artist David Messina.

Mirror Images recounts twin tales: the rise of the mirror James Kirk to the command of the ISS Enterprise as he plots to unseat Captain Christopher Pike, as well as the story of Enterprise crew members whose counterparts were not prominently featured in the original "Mirror, Mirror" episode -- McCoy, Scotty and Uhura, who use their unique positions on the ship to advance their own ambitious agendas.

A second Mirror Images series, spotlighting The Next Generation crew, is slated for the second half of 2008, written by IDW Star Trek editor Andrew Steven Harris and screenwriter George Strayton.