(courtesy Penguin Random House)
Released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the launch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which ran for seven seasons from 1993 to 1999, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War by Mike Chen (writer) and Angel Hernandez (art), is one of those continuations of a series so good that it all but feel like an episode of the show itself.
The artwork is one key ingredient in this mix, so perfectly rendered that not only do all the characters look almost exactly like they do on the screen, which is rarely the case and which, for this graphic novel reader at least, can detract from the story being told – granted, there is a thing called artistic license where you allude rather than slavishly copy someone’s looks but when you’re evoking people we have seen act a story out, getting super close to how they looked really matters – but the world in which they operate feels bang on exact too.
It’s incredibly impressive artwork that is very distinctly representative of the medium to which it belongs, but which also feels like a TV episode sprung to life, with every facial movement or hand gesture or even look in the eyes feeling so eerily on point that you almost begin to wonder if someone didn’t shoot a secret episode of Deep Space Nine when you weren’t looking.
Flawlessly tying into the exemplary visual artistry is Chen’s superlatively good writing which evokes each and every one of the characters so perfectly that there’s none of that jarring sense of thinking “X wouldn’t do that” or “Y wouldn’t say that” and you fall back into every scene and interaction every bit as effortlessly as you would if this were an actual episode of what many regard as Star Trek’s most masterfully intense and clever series (which is saying something in a franchise known for robust, insightful and thoughtful storytelling).
So balletically beautifully do Chen and Hernandez execute the brief that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War feels as it would slot adroitly into the final season of the show in which the episode that contextualises the graphic novel, “The Dogs of War”, is set.
At this point in the hyper-serialised storytelling of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Federation and their unusual coalition of allies including, rather remarkably the Klingons and the Romulans – needs must and all that, with the need to save the Alpha and Beta Quadrants from domination by a powerful enemy to all trumping any petty sectarian interests or geopolitical interests – are setting the scene for an invasion of Cardassia which has fallen to the Dominion and which is being used to fuel their continuing war against the Solids as the Changelings often refer to the races that they perceive have long mistreated them.
Plans in motion and every possible advantage is needed to ensure the Federation and their allies win the day, once and for all.
(courtesy IDW)
So when a device is discovered on the space station – for those who may not be as familiar with the series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is set on a vacated Cardassian mining platform in orbit around their former colony planet of Bajor which the Federation now administers as part of a security pact with the station’s new owner – that has a Borg component which may tilt any invasion of the Dominion’s Alpha Quadrant stronghold in the Allies’ favour, everyone is suddenly paying attention.
But the main game in town, for the crew of the station at least, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War is a sweet purebred Corgi that Quark, who is planning to sell the dog to a buyer with deep pockets, has hidden away until the deal is done and who he names Latinum for obvious reasons.
But when the device is detected, so is Latinum, and while the powers that be care only about what the device can do for them, Deep Space Nine’s crew, worn down by war and in need of some sort of warmhearted diversion, become Latinum’s greatest advocates setting in train a narrative which nods its head as much to the need we all have for connection and belonging, even to a dog caught up in events far beyond its canine understanding, as its does to the wider geopolitical issues playing out in what is the show’s penultimate episode.
What is so damn clever about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War is that it captures the spirit of the show so incredibly well.
Beyond getting the look and sensibility of both characters and storytelling right, what the graphic novel does so well is bring to affecting life what made this show so memorable and which it caused itself to embed itself so irrevocably in the hearts of its fans.
While the show was often about big issues and major developments, it was also very human and intimate, as concerned with what was happening to the people in it as what was happening to the Quadrant as a whole.
You could like say that of all the shows in the Star Trek franchise, but there’s something about Deep Space Nine that made that focus feel even more intense and impactful, and that storytelling centre of gravity is well and truly present in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War which always feels like, for all its big political and war machinations, is about a crew simply trying something to believe in that feels like something they can control in a war where so much, despite their best efforts, defies them at every turn.
It’s that innate humanity and raw emotionalism that powers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Dog of War, a graphic novel which feels, as noted, like an episode sprung to life with all the attendant attention to detail and thoughtfulness that suggests and entails, but which also adds to the legacy of the series and enlarges it to a powerfully affecting degree, something that few later continuations of any series can claim and which proves that, in the right hands, a much-loved show can live on and feel like it never left in the first place.
(courtesy IDW)