The Best Comics of 2025, Part 5: Supernatural and Star Trek: The Last Starship
Keeping it short for the post-Christmas weekend, with two classic franchises revisited in new and exciting ways. Let's! Get! To it!
As some of you may know, the television show Supernatural (2005-2020) was formative to my burgeoning creative brain. I mean, I was fifteen, so Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) already did damage, but we’ll get back to that.
Anyway, from SPN Season 4 onwards, it was a non-stop continuity ride, with little to no room for inconsequential fun. Sure, they still dabbled in Monster-of-the-Week stories, but everything felt bogged down with whatever the macro-arc of the show was at the time. From Season 4, you had Lilith, Lucifer, Leviathan, Eve, Purgatory, Alphas, Metatron, The Darkness, The Mark of Cain stuff, Crowley, Lucifer again, Men of Letters, the Shadow, Apocalypse World, Dichael... and God. Season 2, pre-deal, is the last time you just had… less pressure, less weight of storytelling and cosmology, on the ongoing events of the series.
So when Dynamite Comics announced a brand new Supernatural comic book1, set before the Winchester brothers found their dad, author Greg Pak, artist Eder Messias, colourist Thyago Brandao and letterer Jeff Eckleberry are delivering just the kind of stories I want from one of my favourite media properties.
Eder captures the core of the characters in his art, though not necessarily the likeness. Look at the page above— those two lads are clearly Sam and Dean Winchester, even if they’re not played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles. The brotherly banter, scathing with enough heart to launch a thousand ships (ew) is spot on from Pak, and the colours daub the page in atmosphere and tension. We’ve got Sam getting his waking nightmare / visions, we’ve got a shocking cold open, a smash to credits moment that I’m a big fan of in any medium. We’re only three issues in, and this book was enough to launch into my best of the year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m going to miss Castiel, I love the bunker, I love continuity, but still, this is it for me. This is what I want.
Speaking of continuations, Star Trek: The Last Starship is a book continuing like 3-4 different Trek tangents, and doing so with elite skill and panache. That’s what you can expect from the creative team of Colin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing on words and Adrián Bonilla on art duties.
TLS takes place in the 31st century, a previously unexplored era for the Trek franchise. It’s the story about what happens to the Federation after The Burn, the galaxy-wide catastrophe the USS Discovery investigates when they accidentally time-travelled to the 32nd century, back in the third season of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024). It follows up on characters from the 2022 IDW relaunch of Star Trek as a shared universe comic book2, rather than disparate (albeit fun!) minis. It brings Admiral Kirk back— to life— in this post-Burn universe. There’s an appearance by an unexpected Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023) character who dropped off after the season 2 finale, despite the magnitude of their character.
How can the Federation survive when Warp travel has become a nigh impossibility? How can a previously connected universe stay connected when long distance space travel is no longer as easy as saying “Engage”? For the challenge of a post-Burn existence, a familiar character returns, bringing with them the power they then use to resurrect James T. Kirk. Aboard the newly built USS Omega, a modular, patchwork ship constructed from remains of various others, and powered by Borg-engineered transwarp drives, the first threat this new ship and its odd little crew face?
…Well, it’d have to be the Klingons, right?
This is a well-written, dense adventure that promises to go places we won’t be able to guess. This is centuries after the “present day” Trek of Star Trek: Picard’s 24th century3. Kelly & Lanzing have charted the course of Trek in comics through The Original Series continuation Star Trek: Year Five (2019–2021), as well as the 2022 relaunch. They know their stuff. I wasn’t familiar with Adrián Bonilla’s art before this series, but I can see he’s going to go places. A fantastic launch, spearheaded by a galaxy-spanning debut. I’m hooked.
I know DC Comics had the license for the property at one point, but those Wildstorm-produced miniseries were not what I needed at the time.
Which I loved.
The continuity we’ve followed since TNG’s pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint”, aired in 1987.