Klingons in Comics To Reflect Original Series History

Scott Tipton talked about the difficulties and pleasures of writing a comic book in Klingon for IDW, saying he was doing his homework "to make sure I'm conjugating all of my Klingon verbs correctly....I don’t want to end up on the end of a Painstick in San Diego."

In an interview with WizardUniverse.com, Tipton explained that in writing the comic with his brother David Tipton and illustrator David Messina, the team created a framing narrative set around the time of the explosion of the Klingon moon Praxis, which also set off the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. "It’s a time of real turmoil in the Klingon Empire," explained Tipton. "We focused in on our patriarch Klingon...he looks back on all the Empire's encounters with humans. That’s our device to go back and look at all the encounters with the Enterprise."

Not coincidentally, Captain Kirk (and later Admiral Kirk) plays a significant role in many of these encounters. "Getting a chance to write 1960s kickass Kirk is a dream," added Tipton, who said that the events of "Errand of Mercy" and "The Trouble With Tribbles" will be among those seen through Klingon eyes in the comic. The writers discovered that they were not permitted to use the likenesses of certain actors from the latter, so "one we just wrote out, and the other we just reshifted the scene so you don’t see their face."

Additional stories in the comic explore the events of "A Private Little War", "Day of the Dove" and a new adventure. As for the appearance of the Klingons, "Enterprise established how the boneheaded Klingons and the smooth-headed Klingons coexisted, and we cover that in our first issue. So it will put everyone on the same page as to how they’ve been coexisting...Paramount was very helpful suggesting some ideas for societally how that could work out and why we only see the smooth-headed Klingons in classic 'Trek.' We incorporated a lot of that into our series."

Though Tipton joked that he could probably hail a cab in Klingon, he said that the team brought in experts from the Klingon Language Institute to do the translating, as well as linguist Marc Okrand. Although all the stories in this issue will focus on Original Series-era Klingons, Tipton said that the ideas of family and honor introduced in The Next Generation will be present as well.

The first issue of Klingons: Blood Will Tell is scheduled for release in April. The full interview with Tipton is at WizardUniverse.com.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!