Alien Spotlight

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Star Trek: Alien Spotlight is a series of six comics published by IDW Publishing. The series is thematically linked in a focus on alien races, but the issues are otherwise unconnected. Each issue, set either in Star Trek: The Original Series or Star Trek: The Next Generation time frame, was written and illustrated by a different creative team.

Following the success of the first series IDW are currently developing a second series: Alien Spotlight II.

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 Development 2 Issues 2.1 Covers 3 Appendices 3.1 Chronology 3.2 External links

[edit] Overview

Alien Spotlight was IDW's first Star Trek anthology series, the first time one of their miniseries did not feature a consistent creative team or artistic style. The only thing linking the individual issues together was that each of their stories highlighted an alien race from Star Trek.

How each issue went about putting the featured species in the spotlight varied from issue to issue. The Romulan issue was the only on in the miniseries not to feature Starfleet personnel or primary characters from TOS or TNG. After the Romulan issue the Andorians comes in as the issue with the greatest concentration of the featured species; with the exception of the opening pages the entire issue takes place on Andor and features Andorian characters. In contrast the Vulcan and Orion issues feature just a single member of their featured race.

[edit] Development

Since its earliest announcements the series underwent several changes in the creative teams involved: The Orion issue, originally to be written by Dan Taylor, was written by the Scott & David Tipton. The Vulcan issue was to written by Rick Remender was written by James Patrick, with Remender receiving a story credit. And the Borg issue was written by Andrew Steven Harris rather than the originally announced Steve Niles.

[edit] Issues

Title	Writer	Artist	Cover artist	Published
The Gorn	Scott & David Tipton	David Messina	Zach Howard or David Messina	10 October 2007
Vulcans	James Patrick	Josep Maria Beroy	Zach Howard or Josep Maria Beroy	7 November 2007
Andorians: The Old Ways	Paul D. Storrie	Leonard O'Grady	Zach Howard or Leonard O'Grady	21 November 2007
Orions	Scott & David Tipton	Elena Casagrande	Zach Howard or Elena Casagrande	19 December 2007
Borg	Andrew Steven Harris	Sean Murphy	Zach Howard or Sean Murphy	23 January 2008
Romulans	John Byrne	John Byrne	Zach Howard or John Byrne	27 February 2008

[edit] Covers

Each issue of this series was available in four covers. Two covers were distributed in equally wide availability, one by Zach Howard (with colors by Leonard O'Grady) and one by the issue's interior artist. The other two covers for each issue were more limited availability retail incentive covers, each issue had both a sketch cover (the Zach Howard cover for all issues except the Romulans which used the issue artist's cover) and a photo-cover.

-	The Gorn	Vulcans	Andorians	Orions	Borg	Romulans
Zach Howard covers
Issue artist covers
Sketch covers
Photo covers

[edit] Appendices

IDW Publishing miniseries
Completed series	The Space Between • Klingons: Blood Will Tell • Year Four • Alien Spotlight • Intelligence Gathering
Current series	Turnaround • The Enterprise Experiment • Assignment: Earth
Future series	Mirror Images • Alien Spotlight II • Romulans: The Hollow Crown • Probability Factor

[edit] Chronology

• The series featured stories from a wide range of periods in Star Trek history, the chronological order of the stories is as follows:

Issue	Date	Setting
Vulcans	c. 2253	Shortly after Spock joined the crew of the Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike, prior to the TOS pilot episode "The Cage".
Orions	c. 2264	Shortly after Christopher Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain, prior to the TOS episode: "The Menagerie".
Romulans	2266	Immediately before the TOS episode: "Balance of Terror".
The Gorn	c. 2282	Prior to the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when Chekov was serving on the USS Reliant.
Andorians: The Old Ways	2370	Shortly after the final TNG episode "All Good Things..."
Borg	2279	Between the TNG movies Insurrection and Nemesis. Also has time travel to just before the TNG episode: "The Neutral Zone".

[edit] External links

• Alien Spotlight article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.
• Alien Spotlight page on IDW's website
• Alien Spotlight page at the Star Trek Comics Checklist