Trekker: Battlefields, New Kickstarters to Back, and Comics

Last November, comics creator Ron Randall released Battlefields, the latest volume in his long-running series, Trekker, about future interplanetary bounty hunter Mercy St Clair. I have written many times on this blog about how much I enjoy this series (I have added a Trekker label to those posts, rather than put all the links here). This volume continues to demonstrate all the qualities that make this a great series, but while I do want to talk about this book, they also connect to some larger thoughts I’ve been having about comics in general.

Trekker:Darkstar Zephyr

Trekker is back! Ron Randall has launched a Kickstarter for the next book in his science fiction series about bounty hunter Mercy St Clair, so this seems like an opportune time to talk about the most recent volume, The Darkstar Zephyr. I’ve written about the previous stories here and here, so I’m going to focus less on the background and more on the current book. Also, I have a pretty cool personal connection to this one.

Trekker: Chapeltown

Earlier this year, I wrote about Ron Randall’s Trekker, a longtime favorite science fiction series telling the adventures of Mercy St Clair, a future bounty hunter, or trekker. At the time, Randall was raising funds on Kickstarter to self-publish—for the first time—the latest volume in the series, Chapeltown. That campaign was a rousing success, and the resulting publication is a fine one indeed. He is currently raising funds for the next volume. That campaign blew past its initial goal in less than a day, so its success is already a sure thing. But the more money he raises, the nicer the book will be. So I thought this would be a good time to talk about Chapeltown, to help shine some more light on the series.

Spoilers after the jump; this book has a bunch of pretty drastic changes to the status quo of the characters, and I don’t think I can discuss the book effectively while trying to tiptoe around those.

Ron Randall's Trekker

Recently, I was trying to remember how many creator-owned comics from the 1980s are still being produced today, still being created by their original creators. I could only remember a handful, and I was embarrassed to see that not only had I forgotten quite a number of them, like Mage by Matt Wagner and Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini, but they were all titles I am still buying and reading. What prompted this question? The launch of a new Kickstarter campaign to bring the latest volume of Ron Randall’s Trekker into print. I’ve enjoyed Ron Randall’s work since his early days, on a science fiction backup in the pages of DC’s Warlord, called The Barren Earth. And I’ve been a fan of his series Trekker, featuring a female bounty hunter in the future, since it first appeared in Dark Horse Comics Presents #4, from 1987. Seeing new stories coming out today, over 30 years later, makes me extremely happy, and I want to share some of that joy with you.