Fontana On 'Star Trek: Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment'

Whether working on Star Trek for television or comics, the emphasis is on the human story for Dorothy Fontana.

As reported by Ign.com, working on a comic means greater freedom of expression. "...Anything can be drawn," explained Fontana. "So any sort of situation or alien or creature or, you know...that can all be put down on the page, where we could not have done it at the time with the technology available to us. That was why the animated series had pluses even thought it was stories that were shorter in length, simpler stories, really basically one main plotline and maybe a possible small subplot. But we could do anything, because you could draw it."

That doesn't mean that the ability to draw more exotic characters and scenes takes away from the heart of Star Trek, the story. "I think we always geared our stories to the human element," said Fontana. "We were always telling stories for people to enjoy. Gene Roddenberry always used to say if you're not writing for other human beings, who are you writing for?! So we always kept that in mind, but the fact [is] that for instance in the animated series and in the comic book you can go underwater to an underwater world [and] you can have all sorts of creatures and aliens. In the animated series we had Larry Niven's Kzinti, the big cats. And that's the sort of thing that could easily be done [with drawings], but not be as easily done with the technology we had."

Speaking of the human element, Fontana admits that her favorite Star Trek character was someone who was only half-human. "Well, of course I've always liked Spock," she admitted. But she also has a soft spot for the other two major Star Trek characters. "But I am equally in love with Doctor McCoy and Jim Kirk," said Fontana. "Because the triumvirate, as Shatner once said, 'Between the three of us we make one whole actor.' In the sense of the characters: One was the brain, one was the emotion, one was the physicality as expressed in their characters. But we got more out of them than that. That was just on the surface."

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