Wil Wheaton From Exile

Just a quick note: Had a message forwarded to me from Wil Wheaton, whose character Wesley Crusher figures prominently in Star Trek: The Last Generation. Wil has become an accomplished author in his own right, penning several books, writing Star Trek TOS manga for Tokyopop (which I gave high marks to in a guest column over at TrekMovie.com) and running Wil Wheaton In Exile, one of the best, longest-running blogs in all of geekdom.

I had a chance to chat with him briefly when our mutual friend Tony Pascale introduced us before I moderated the Star Trek publishing panel at the San Diego Comic-Con this year, where Wil represented for T-Pop among other colleagues from IDW and my friends over at Pocket Books. Since he sat next to me, at one point I noticed him texting on his phone. I found out later he was posting to Twitter about being on the panel–as it was actually happening.

A former Star Trek actor, now writing manga and blogging about D&D, video games and Rocky Horror, posting to the Internets while sitting on a panel at the San Diego Comic Convention? Dude, your geek-fu is hardcore.

Anyway, Wil passed on some comments about Last Generation to a friend of mine from TrekWeb.com, who sent them on to me, so I thought I’d post them here:

WOW! The art on TrekWeb looks very cool… And that story sounds fantastic; it may be the first Trek comic I pick up in twenty years.

Coming from someone who once had to endure countless stories of Wesley being lame, and whose geek-fu could set my geek-fu’s ass on fire before ditching it with no legs at the bank of a volcanic river, I’m genuinely flattered.

Since I reviewed Wil’s first manga story (“he establishes his cred as a comics creator well beyond his celebrated cult of geek”), he’s had another published in one of Tokyopop’s subsequent Trek volumes that came out over the summer; and it’s not lip-service for me to say that even as his first comics works, they easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the stories from veteran Trek writers like novelist Diane Duane, TV scribe David Gerrold and comics guru Mike W. Barr. Wil’s stories have been illustrated by E.J. Su, one of the top artists who worked for me on the Transformers books at IDW, so people should definitely head to their comics shop or bookstore and check them out.

While I’m at it, I should also put in a shout-out to Wil’s friend Luis Reyes, who I got to know while he was Trek editor for Tokyopop and I was his counterpart at IDW, and we had a chance to hang out together at the gala, all-star, hey-is-that-William-Shatner unveiling of Star Trek: The Tour at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, not quite halfway between our respective cities of Los Angeles and San Diego.

(Which, by coincidence, featured a short film of Wil as Wes on the bridge of the U.S.S. TItan; and which, by more coincidence, has now taken up residence at the Air and Space Museum here in San Deigo.)

Luis is a great guy and a top-notch editor, and it looks like he and I will finally get the opportunity to work together for a company up in L.A. in the soon-to-be immediate future.

Wesley Crusher figures prominently in Star Trek: The Last Generation, appearing on at least three of the covers. Here, he's hunted, and then firebombed. What other tragedies could we possibly visit upon him?

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