Star Trek: Red Shirts is a Star Trek graphic novel. It’s written by Christopher Cantwell, Megan Levens, and is being published by IDW. It is due for release on the 12th of May, 2026. This review is intended to be free of spoilers, but none of us are perfect. Consider yourself warned! I was provided with a review copy by the publishers. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.
Blurb
The doomed Starfleet crew members, the red shirts, must track down spies on an isolated planet in this graphic novel.
Stranded on the snow-ridden planet Arkonia 89, the crew of the U.S.S. Warren has a small window in which to pin down spies seeking to steal classified secrets and keep Starfleet data out of their nefarious hands.
They face threats not only from their faceless enemies but from the brutalizing elements and wildlife of a planet far from home. In this complicated story of betrayal, loss, and redemption, the red shirts’ lives and Starfleet’s sanctity are on the line…and no one is safe.
This heartrending story by writer Christopher Cantwell (Star Trek: Defiant) and artist Megan Levens (Star Trek) marks a new beginning for the Star Trek universe, featuring Starfleet’s most intrepid and doomed crew members: red shirts. Now, finally, they get their own story.
Collects the complete miniseries Star Trek: Red Shirts #1–5.
Review
Star Trek: Red Shirts takes one of the franchise’s oldest jokes and tries to turn it into a serious story about the people who die to keep the bridge crew mythic. It’s a smart angle, and the book commits to it fully: no winks, no parody, no safety net. We follow a security team dropped into a mission that’s already compromised, already under‑briefed, already stacked against them.
Does this feel a lot like a retread of the John Scalzi novel? Yes. The answer, to be clear, is yes.
That aside, the execution is confident. The pacing is tight, the action is clear, and Megan Levens’ art does a lot of the heavy lifting. She manages to make the TOS aesthetic feel lived‑in rather than merely nostalgic, and the chapter‑break portraits are some of the best Trek art I’ve seen in years. The book looks great, moves well, and has a proper sense of physicality. It’s a good comic on a craft level.
Where it falters, at least for me, is tone. The bleakness isn’t just a flavour; it’s the whole meal. The book keeps returning to the same point: redshirts are expendable, Starfleet is indifferent, the mission is a meat grinder. Actually, it returns to it so often that the emotional range narrows to that single note. The gore is inventive, the deaths are varied, the tension is real, but the cynicism becomes predictable. You can feel the noose tightening around the characters until there’s not much room left for anything else.
There’s a twist, of course. It works well. It reframes the story in a way that’s clever and thematically coherent, and it’s the moment where the book’s ambition actually pays off. But it also has the side effect of flattening some of the earlier emotional beats. What begins as a story about survival and trauma becomes something colder, and intentionally so. I think the whole thing is a book that I admire more than I enjoy.
And that’s really the shape of my reaction. This is a well‑made book with a clear point of view and a willingness to push against the franchise’s usual optimism, for better or worse. It’s sharp, stylish, and occasionally brutal in ways that do feel earned. But it’s also a book that limits itself by leaning so hard into its own thesis that it forgets to leave space for contradiction, warmth, or anything resembling the messy humanity that makes Trek, even dark Trek, feel alive.
Really, it’s smart, confident, worth reading, but not something that lingers in the mind, nor the heart. I respect what it’s doing; I just didn’t connect with it beyond the level of craft.
Rating: 3/5