Star Trek’s Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Heather Antos Unveil Bold New DAY OF BLOOD Event

Jackson Lanzing: It’s been amazing. We had the Star Trek panel earlier where we announced some exciting new developments. We also got a sneak peek at the artwork for the upcoming Star Trek series, set after the events of Day of Blood, which has been incredibly fun.

Collin Kelly: We’ve been spending time at our booth, and the Star Trek fans have been showing up in droves.

JL: It’s clear that Star Trek is a big hit at our booth, which is fantastic. It’s always a thrill to see fans captivated by their favorite characters in these books, especially since we are lifelong Star Trek fans ourselves.

CK: Absolutely. We are fans first and foremost, so we have the pedigree of reading both the good and the bad. What we found the key here was communication. We are reading every script that Chris Cantwell, who’s the writer of Star Trek: Defiant-

JL: And is our co-writer on everything on Day of Blood? We all broke it down together in a room physically. All of us were in a room breaking that story together. So everyone knew what was up from moment one.

CK: And through that communication, we were able to really keep everyone on the same page, to the point where sometimes we would argue. It’s really important to make sure each of us are representing each other’s characters correctly, because it can tell kind of one large story. And I think that was really one of the magic tricks we pulled off.

HA: I also want to be clear when they argue they said, “I don’t know if I agree with that.” And that was the extent of that.

JL: Conflict is actually really light because Chris comes from the same space we do. We were friends before we started this book. He came onto this line because when we were doing Star Trek: Year Five before Heather came on, and we were getting our feet wet on Star Trek. Chris was a fan of the book, and he would DM me on Twitter. We didn’t know each other. He would DM me and be like, “Hey, how do I pitch Star Trek? I have a Janice Rand miniseries. How do I make this happen?” And I would be like, “You don’t. There are actually a lot of problems with doing Janice Rand.” But at the same time that he was doing that, I was watching Halt and Catch Fire. And I was like, “Halt and Catch Fire is one of my favorite things.” We became fast friends over a mutual admiration society. And so when we had this opportunity to bring somebody else in, we were like, “It’s got to be Chris because we know that we’re already going to sync with him.”

In terms of how we actually manage an event, I think the other thing that’s really key is not putting plot first, which might seem insane for an event, because events are driven by plot. Something big happens in every event. In comic events, it’s almost always the world that explodes, right? It’s some big thing. Sorry. And we knew that we had that in Kahless making his move. He has been gathering power, he has been killing gods, not just because he wants them dead, but because he wants their power.

And as he has taken that power and weaponized it. He understands how to wield it and has returned to Kronos to take the power he thinks he deserves. And that kickoff, the coup that he pulls off in issue one–that’s the plot. After that, everything else in Day of Blood is built on character, which is always sort of our thing in Star Trek. Frankly, it’s kind of Collin and mine’s thing in every book. It’s about the arcs and the characters and what they’re going through. Here, it was a chance to say, “Okay, we have how many characters? 22 characters in this book or something?” Day of Blood has every Star Trek character on the board right now. We threw them all in here and then literally in that room said, “What’s every single one of their arcs? What is Sisko’s arc? What is Worf’s arc? What is B’Elanna Torres arc?”

HA: That’s literally the first thing we did on the board. We wrote, “Who’s the cast? What are the interesting pairings that we and fans want to see, the interesting interactions of these characters? What makes sense? And then where do we have to end up? It’s Google Maps, right?

JL: Yeah

HA: That’s Google Maps. “Okay, here are all the different routes. Who’s paying tolls and who’s jumping across the city skylines?”

JL: And how do you use that to have characters grow and change? Because to me, event storylines tend to, I think, falter when they become an effort of plot mechanics and spectacle. Plot mechanics and spectacle are relatively easy. And frankly, plot mechanics can overburden a book very easily. If you know what the character’s going through, if you know that the character’s growing and changing, then the plot can be there, but the character’s heart will take you through. And Star Trek’s generally been really great about that. So-

HA: Events don’t matter if there’s no shift in status quo.

JL: Exactly. And that status quo can’t just be the world; it has to be in the heart of the character. This event isn’t just one that happens outside Sisko. This is the culmination of his arc in the first 12 issues of Star Trek. By the end of this arc, he’s on a new arc, heading into the second year of Star Trek. Same thing with Worf.

Worf basically ends his arc here and then gets to embrace a new one moving forward. Everybody’s going through a version of that. And it’s not like everybody’s going through their arc culminations here, but they’re all plotted along the line so that the event matters. Not just because Kronos is under new leadership or because X ship blew up or whatever, but because the characters themselves have been fundamentally changed by the events.