Coming to a conclusion by the time the second episode of
Picard was released, the
Picard Countdown comic series sheds a little light on events prior to the series, most notably Picard's relationships with Raffi Musiker, and his Romulan pals Laris and Zhaban. Continue below for my thoughts on the series.
The three-part series (each issue slightly longer, at 24-story-pages, rather than the normal
Star Trek 20-page book) was brought to us by writers Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson; a team that have previously worked on all of IDW's
Discovery comics. Johnson has been busy tying into the leading edge of
Star Trek productions since IDW's first
Countdown series for the first Kelvin timeline movie (subsequently writing most of the numerous Kelvin timeline comics that followed), while Beyer is no less than the co-creator of
Picard, a writer on
Discovery, and has a highly regarded run of
Voyager novels to her name too. They are joined by artist Angel Hernandez, who has worked with them on several of the previous
Discovery and Kelvin timeline comics too. So we enter this story in safe hands, very familiar with IDW's
Star Trek house style, which baring a few more experimental tales is normally very screen accurate in visual style, and adapt at teasing out a prequel story to a new production.
This particular story jumps right to the point: We are joining Picard, and Raffi, as they work to bring to reality the Romulan evacuation in preparation for the Hobus supernova (not so named in the series), and before the attack on Mars that halted that mission. We are fairly quickly introduced to Laris and Zhaban, and then there are a few hiccups, due to a lot of sneaky twisty Romulan antics. What the story does best is set up Picard and Raffi's relationship, and give a rewarding backstory for Laris and Zhaban. Where I'd have liked more, is giving us a wider view of the Romulan evacuation effort; as this story is contained to one planet, and has a surprisingly upbeat ending; I suppose that works well for everything to then unravel after, as we've seen in the series so far. It's hard to talk about that without some spoilers though, so proceed with caution from here on.
