IDW Publishing announced Star Trek: Zero Point in February as the companion series to its new flagship Star Trek ongoing launching in September. Zero Point arrives in October, written by Charlie Jane Anders, following lesbian Captain Raffi Musiker as she commands a starship tasked with preventing tomorrow’s disasters, guided by a powerful artificial intelligence wearing the face of a familiar ally that may know too much and understand too little about hope. No artist has been announced.
Anders was unambiguous about his intended audience. “I’m determined to write a Trek comic that newbies can read with no homework required: there are no easter eggs, no callbacks to deep lore. Anyone who loves Becky Chambers or Martha Wells ought to be able to pick up this comic and get a fun science fiction story about artificial consciousness and exoplanets.”
That is a Star Trek comic explicitly designed to avoid being a Star Trek comic. The franchise turns 60 this year. IDW’s response to that milestone is a companion series built for readers who have never watched a single episode and don’t plan to start.
The hire of Anders follows a visible pattern in how IDW is staffing its Star Trek line in 2026. We reported on the Stargazers WEBTOON series, an officially canon “Boys Love” romance set in the Deep Space Nine era, written by Sam Maggs, an openly lesbian activist whose public statements describe a career dedicated to LGBTQ representation as a primary creative goal.
Anders occupies the same lane. In his own words: “I really had a fire lit under me again, and a feeling that I have to do what I can with whatever platform I have to help trans people be more visible and to help people to see the humanity of trans people.” That statement came after Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, and he described the political moment as the catalyst for foregrounding trans visibility in his work. He followed it by writing “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” a short story about a trans woman undergoing brutal medical conversion therapy, which she described as “very explicitly my kind of response, as a trans person, to the Trump era.”
Anders co-created Escapade, a transgender mutant superhero, for Marvel’s Voices: Pride anthology in 2022, and co-organized the Cross-Gender Caravan, a national transgender and genderqueer author tour. His writing memoir is titled Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. His podcast with Annalee Newitz, Our Opinions Are Correct, has won multiple Hugo Awards. His public identity as a writer is inseparable from his transgender activism. He has said directly that “my experiences as a trans person always come back in my writing,” describing the core subject of her work as “the desperate struggle to claim your identity, an identity that people either don’t understand or are hostile to.”
None of that is hidden. IDW knew exactly who they were hiring, and this is what Heather Antos has done with the Star Trek brand consistently.
The full picture of IDW’s Star Trek 60th anniversary lineup tells the story plainly. In May: Star Trek: Celebrations 2026, an LGBTQIA+ anthology featuring the franchise’s queer characters, produced by an all-LGBTQIA+ creative lineup, described in IDW’s own promotional copy as “exemplifying Gene Roddenberry’s mission for us all to one day celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” In September: the flagship Star Trek #1 with lesbian Seven of Nine continuing from Picard. In October: Zero Point with Raffi Musiker, written by a transgender activist who has stated her platform exists to advance transgender visibility and who has explicitly described her fiction as a response to political opposition to trans identity. Running alongside all of this on WEBTOON: the Boys Love DS9 romance written by a lesbian activist.
Raffi Musiker is not an accident of casting in this lineup. She is Picard’s most overtly politicized recurring character, a character whose arc across the Picard series centered heavily on substance abuse recovery, broken family relationships, and a same-sex relationship with Seven of Nine. Handing her a solo series to a writer whose stated creative mission is transgender visibility is a deliberate editorial decision, not an incidental one.
What IDW is not building is a Star Trek line for the existing Star Trek audience. The fans who watched The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, who built the fanbase that makes the Trek brand valuable enough to put on a comic cover, are not the target. The target is a reader who, in Anders’ own description, loves Becky Chambers and Martha Wells and wants a story with no prior homework required.
Paramount cannot get Starfleet Academy renewed past Season 2. The DS9 WEBTOON romance launched with what appears to be AI-art visuals on a mobile platform. The Star Trek: Legacy series fans spent years demanding was handed to IDW as a monthly comic. And the companion series to that comic is written by someone who has publicly described her fiction as political activism.
The brand is being used. The audience it was built on is not being served.
What would it take for you to trust a Star Trek comic line with your time and money at this point? Let us know in the comments.
If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
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That guy in the picture made me laugh so hard.
I must be out of touch. Who are Becky Chambers and Martha Wells?