Story: Warren Ellis
Pictures: Brandon McKinney
Letters: Ryan Yount
Publisher: AIT/PlanetLar

"The anti-Star Trek" is what Warren Ellis describes this as. But that isn't really true - Star Trek, at its core, was about hope for humanity. Maybe it buried that message under cheesy effects and stilted dialog and technobabble and some type of bizarre communist/fascist utopianism, but it provided a window into a future where humanity existed and produced people heroic enough to make sure it would continue to exist. And Switchblade Honey, despite the drinking and drugs and stupid military, is about people heroic enough to make sure humanity will continue to exist.

The book starts out strong, going through the motions of the character introductions, each of whom had been wronged by the system but was being given one last chance to prove their value. We then jump into a little mystery, some action scenes, and a rushed resolution before it is over. See, just like Star Trek to try to resolve all the plot threads and obvious foreshadowing in the few minutes after the last commercial.

I was happy to see the Introduction by Ellis, where he admitted that this isn't him trying to be intellectual, it is him being drunk and telling jokes, since it makes a nice excuse for some of the rougher edges of the script. Not all the setups are paid off, not all the dialog comes off naturally, sometimes the setting doesn't quite seem thoroughly understood. None of it really matters too much in the end.

The art does a fine job telling the story, with some nice attention to the Star Trek-inspired sets. We do get to see the camera shake, we do get to see the computers shoot out sparks. The interiors are all well done, although the ship designs don't make a huge impression. The character designs occassionally seemed a little off, but it never distracted from the story. The all-black backgrounds on the paper quality used led to not very dark blacks, which unfortunately flattened the look of some of the exterior space scenes.

Of course, who wouldn't love to see a weekly Star Trek show where the characters are actual people who want to go to a bar and get pissed at each other and humanity accidentally spreads war instead of peace. Even this little glimpse of what it would be like is more interesting than all the episodes of Enterprise that I've seen.

This isn't the anti-Trek, it is Trek with all the polished edges scratched up, all the pristine sets left to rot, and the bogus imperialist view of humanity spreading peace to the stars replaced with the acknowledgement that we will spread stupidity and war and all the bad things we have on Earth, but we will also bring with the good underneath all of that which eventually will shine through.