One of the highlights of any conventions, especially this year’s Dragon Con is the opportunity to sit and speak with some of my favorite comic book writers and artists. This year, I got the opportunity to sit down with the dynamic dup behind some of the best arcs in Star Trek comics along with taking over something near and dear to my heart, the new Dungeons & Dragons series coming to Dark Horse Comics.

Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly redefined Star Trek comics by building their run around Captain Benjamin Sisko — and giving him the return Deep Space Nine fans have waited decades for. I sat down with the duo on the convention floor to talk about why Sisko had to come back, what it meant to play with the full Star Trek toybox, their new three-issue horror saga You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive, and why The Last Starship is the perfect place to end their Trek era for now.

Super Powered Fancast: One of the first things I wanted to say is how much I’m loving the Star Trek. I’m a huge Trek nerd. I’ve been a Trek fan since like 1979, when my dad first showed me the show.

Jackson Lanzing: Everybody’s Star Trek origin.

Super Powered Fancast: Right. My dad chose Star Trek.

Collin Kelly: You can credit dads for many things. I think Star Trek is kind of the one minuscule, redeeming thing. That wonderful thing of, well, at least then you know that some part of them is like, yeah, I want you to dream about a better future. To put into your head the dream that things can be better, which is itself just a wonderful parental drive, even if the person themselves is flawed and complicated like all fathers would be.

Super Powered Fancast: Very, very true. And speaking of fathers, because the one show that connected with me the most was Deep Space Nine. I’m a father too now. I’ve got a son named Jake. So what brought about bringing him [Sisko] back? I think it was such a great way to bring him back in the storyline and just give him purpose.

Jackson Lanzing: When we were first brought on for Star Trek, they asked us, what does the book look like if it’s just called Star Trek? It’s not tied to an individual series.

So our pitch was going to be, we want to take from every part of the animal. We want to find something from every part of Star Trek so that anywhere you came in, even if you were a new fan from Lower Decks or whatever, you had something to hold on to.

But we knew for us it needed to be anchored on something that mattered that deeply, that we would want to hang the whole rest of Star Trek on it.

And truthfully, from just a really personal place, Benjamin Sisko is a very important character to me. He’s a very important character to Collin. He was in many ways not just an example of really positive masculinity and really constructive leadership, and of leadership under really terrible circumstances, and of how flawed humans can still be great humans and good humans. But he was kind of just a dad for us. He was Star Trek dad, and he showed that so beautifully in his relationship with Jake.

And then his ending always left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Not because it’s not beautiful — I really love how DS9 ends — but because he says, because Avery Brooks made them put it in there, “I will be back.” Because he did not want to be an absentee father. He was like, “I don’t feel comfortable with that. We’ve seen what happens in ‘The Visitor.’ I don’t want to be that.”

And then Star Trek never returned to it, making him canonically an absentee father. I was like, I just can’t live with that. I as a fan require that closure. I require that promise to be fulfilled, and I know we’re never going to get Avery Brooks back, so we might as well take the swing and see if the comics are the place that allows us to do that.

So that was in our initial pitch. We pitched all the various characters, all the things we wanted to do. But the very top of it was like, it’s all about Sisko. And we thought that would be the thing that lost us the job.

And instead, I think because every other Star Trek captain was being exploited at that time. Picard has his own show. Kirk had his own stuff, Strange New Worlds coming in. Janeway had Prodigy. Everybody else had something. And there was nothing for Sisko.

So we were fortunate enough to be there for that character when that character needed us, and that character was there for us when we needed him.

Super Powered Fancast: And that’s awesome. And I think that’s one of the reasons why your work on Trek has endured, is because you have access to that toybox. I love seeing those characters mixed into different stories. I love seeing Shaxs in that world. It made absolutely no sense, and yet it made all the sense in the world. Was it easier to create stories knowing you had that kind of freedom?

Collin Kelly: Absolutely. And as Jack mentioned at the start, our goal was to find touchpoints for anyone, a way to bring you into the story. But also, with our intentions toward Sisko, we felt that is something Star Trek really needed. That was important to our hearts.

As fans, we want to see these characters smash into each other just for the storytelling potential and the character-interaction potential. Getting the full gamut of these characters to play with lets stories just organically start to fire off, because they’ve never had the opportunity to play together.

The old shows had a contract problem where it was very hard to put a character from Next Gen on Deep Space Nine, and very hard to put a character from DS9 or Next Gen on Voyager, because of the way the contracts were structured. We don’t have to deal with that. So it also gave us a really unique opportunity to do something the shows could never do.

When you’re in the comic space, you want to be original and new and fresh, and that gave us that opportunity.

Super Powered Fancast: Transitioning out of Star Trek, because I could talk about that all day — I’ve read the first issue of your new series. You’ll Never Leave [This Place Alive]? Can you tell readers what they can look forward to, without spoiling it?

Lanzing & Kelly: Sure. You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive is a three-issue horror saga from us. It is a really contained, really tight story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Readers can really expect that in three issues they’re going to get a whole horror movie out of this three-issue comic. 40-page first issue, 30-page second issue, 30-page third issue. Big, oversized issues. A lot of story in it.

In that story, they’re going to meet five kids from a small, isolated community out in the middle of nowhere. Not a religious cult, like a family cult. It’s three families, and there are five kids, and they’ve recently suffered the loss of one of their parents. And so all the rest of them are really bound together by that tragedy.

And now, here they are at 18, about to move on with their lives and finally get to see the rest of the world. And their parents have promised them that will happen if they can pass the Ascendance trial. And as they go to the Ascendance trial, they learn that the world their parents have established for them, and maybe some of the lessons they’ve been taught about what is going to happen to them, are lies. And that, in fact, their world is designed much more as a trap — and one that they will never leave alive.

So it is a horror story about parental betrayal. It’s a horror story about the ways the old generation refuses to let go to the new.

And in many ways it is the third part of a horror saga we’ve been doing, re-examining classic monsters. Our first one was Wifwulf, which re-examined werewolves through the lens of feminine escape. We did Principles of Necromancy, which re-examined Frankenstein through the lens of a young man’s ambition, but never through his perspective — always through the people who were affected by him. And finally here, we’re getting our take on vampires.

Super Powered Fancast: That’s awesome. I love when you guys do things in a genre or a world that I love like Star Trek, but I also love seeing you guys branch out and do original stuff. Do you ever feel like the original stuff is maybe a little bit of a palate cleanser? Because even though you’re writing your own story, you’re still kind of locked into characters you didn’t create.

Lanzing & Kelly: 100%. We’ve been so blessed to work with pretty much exclusively incredible editors on all of our licensed work — Marvel, DC. We’ve got to tell really good stories, incredible characters, great editors. But at the same time, exactly, you’re playing with someone else’s toys.

And we love notes from everybody, but there is a really empowering element — when you get notes and it’s your project, then you can say, no. Our vision is going to stand here and this is what it’s going to be.

The exciting thing is, on You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive, we’re once again teamed up with Heather Antos, our editor from Star Trek. And Heather Antos only has great opinions. She’s really just one of the best editors in the game.

Super Powered Fancast: I’ve actually interviewed Heather before. I’m a huge fan of hers.

Lanzing & Kelly: She’s a sharp wit, incredible woman, and very, very good at protecting her talent within licenses, but also inspiring her talent to do better. She’s great. She’s like a coach. She’s a really excellent coach.

Super Powered Fancast: What’s really funny is, not only did she help inspire me to do this, but she really inspired me just from our first interview to make being on time a priority, because I was late.

Collin Kelly: She’s given us the exact same note, and we’ve been working with her for seven years. That’s how she does.

Jackson Lanzing: I think this is where I really feel like we lucked out. While we’ve been doing our licensed work for a while on Star Trek, it’s been on this book called The Last Starship. And The Last Starship is not a bunch of characters you know, and it’s not a bunch of nostalgia plays. It is a mostly original, creator-owned feeling comic that just uses Star Trek as a backbone to tell a story. Truthfully, getting to have our last bit of Star Trek, at least for now, be something that feels so much like a creator-owned where we really feel like we’re flying free — man, that’s awesome. That’s what you want.

Super Powered Fancast: I think that’s one of the best things about The Last Starship, in my opinion, is so much of the story is outside of canon, so you have a little bit more freedom, both in story and characterization. At first I was a little hesitant about you guys bringing back Kirk, but then I was like, this is not Kirk. This is almost the interpretation of Kirk that everyone wants. Everyone’s kind of projecting their own Kirk onto him.

Jackson Lanzing: That is the whole point of that character. Oh God, I’m glad you got it. We got to start from Kirk in year five. Page one of that book, it’s Kirk looking at himself effectively and being like, what am I if I’m not captain of the Enterprise? And now here, 700 years later, this copy of a copy of him is asking himself, what am I? Who am I? And is the answer the captain of the Enterprise, or is the answer something else? Who is this guy?

Getting to tear that apart and understand that here at the end of Trek, to answer the questions we set up at the beginning of Trek, it just feels like an enormous exhale, because I’m like, we did it. I’ve seen the last page of The Last Starship. I know we landed. It’s an amazing story. I can’t wait for people to get to the end, to the point where I’m almost upset that it’s going to end.

It was always the plan. We always knew it had to be 12 issues and we had to get out of the way. Not just because the story couldn’t sustain more than that, but honestly Chris and Charlie are about to launch their new Star Trek runs, they need to be in the spotlight. That’s what that needs to be, and that’s been the plan for years and years.

So for us, I think we’ll come back to Last Starship, and I think we’ll do more in that era. We’ve left ourselves these giant 25-year gaps in the storyline so that we can come in and play whenever we desire to. But we don’t want to overstay our welcome. We want to get in, tell you the story, get out, and I think we absolutely do. I’m so thankful for that book, and if we had to leave Star Trek for a while, which has been our intention, I think we left it in exactly the right place and in exactly the right hands.

Super Powered Fancast: Thank you guys so much.

Lanzing & Kelly: Our absolute joy. Absolutely. A pleasure. Thank you so much.

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