We’re following up this week’s retro review of the classic Star Trek / X-Men crossover comic with the sequel, 1998’s meetup of the famous mutant heroes with Captain Picard’s crew aboard the Enterprise-E!

Order Second Contact:

• This front piece shows readers exactly what type of visuals to expect in this book. Cary Nord provides pencils, Scott Koblish inks, and Liquid! the colors. From left to right are Riker, Worf, Wolverine, Sean Cassidy, Colossus, Data, Nightcrawler, and Storm. The character work is not good. Worf and Sean are lost in darkness, Data’s face is horrendous, and Nightcrawler is gaunt. The colors are strikingly bold, but are wasted on this art.

• There’s a wraparound variant cover painted by Vince Evans that is a definite eye catcher. Looking at the image as a whole, the characters shown, from left to right, are Worf, Troia, Kitty, Angel, Colossus, La Forge, Storm, Data, Wolverine, and Riker. Behind Riker are head shots of a Sentinel and a Borg. The Enterprise flies above the scene through a bright orange cloudy mass. Several of the faces are too dark, but this is a much stronger cover.

Picking up immediately after the events of Star Trek: First Contact, the Enterprise has wound up orbiting Earth circa the late 1990’s. After engaging stealth mode, the senior staff meets and La Forge reveals that the array’s processing core has fused and needs to be replaced.

Such technology shouldn’t be on Earth at this time, but scans have located Shi’ar technology in two locations: one is the Baxter Building and the other at Professor Xavier’s mansion. Two teams are sent to each location, with the second team comprised of Data, La Forge, and Troi.

They are discovered first by Wolverine and then Colossus. Their conflict is stopped when the Enterprise is mentioned, causing the Canadian to ask, “Are you some of Kirk’s people?” This causes Picard listening from the ship to say, “Captain James Tiberius Kirk, my most illustrious predecessor. It would seem the man made a habit of popping up where he was least expected.”

The two teams meet and all seems well until a classic Fantastic Four and Avenger villain appears and sets them on a quest.

Writers Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton have crafted a neat story for these two groups to meet. The crux of the story has two teams sent into two moments in the past to correct chaotic anomalies. One group revisits the classic Chris Claremont/John Byrne two-parter, while the other visits the opening moments of the third Star Trek series.

The action in both locations is very good, with the expected conflicts occurring, though Abnett and Edginton add some new spins. It was a bit disappointing to have the X-Men, who recognize the villain and know his reputation, willingly believe what he says. It’s only with the arrival of two Next Gen characters do they realize his sinister intentions.

That aside, the rest of the book is fun, though the final page is a cliffhanger that leads into the TNG / X-Men novel Planet X.

The pencils are by Cary Nord and the inks by Scott Koblish. The first page is a splash of the Enterprise-E’s bridge showing five of the senior staff. Data’s not bad looking, but the characters behind him are not good: Riker and Worf have their faces blackened to create depth — though the bridge is never lit that darkly to have them be so, while Picard and Troi’s faces aren’t done well.

Things improve on pages 2 and 3 with a double-paged splash of the Enterprise above the Earth. The inserted panel of Data is good, but the second with Riker and Picard is not. The fourth page features the leads in the ready room looking close enough to their film counterparts, though Page 5 has a terrible Troi.

This happens throughout the book with characters looking okay to poor. The X-Men don’t fare any better; look at Colossus on 12 and 13. The villain is especially poorly rendered. Settings are also disappointing. They’re very remedial in the majority of the book, though the bridge of the Enterprise has a good amount of detail. The interior of the villain’s ship is very poor.

A crossover book deserves to be much better than this.

John Kalisz is working overtime on this book. He’s providing a lot of blending of colors to create depth in the art. However, given what he’s got to work with, Kalisz can only do so much; see that last panel on 4 and first panel on Page 5.

The book has a welcoming bright color scheme throughout, making the book bold, with the sequences in the Marvel Universe’s future especially vivid with a violet sky that represents night. Sounds are also colored well. Kalisz deserves applause for his work.

The captain and first officer’s logs, dialogue, the story’s title, the book’s credits, a transmission, the speech of two different mechanical characters, yells, three foreign words, and the tease for the novel are created by Chris Eliopoulos.

The unique fonts of the mechanical characters are excellent as are the powerful sounds. Eliopoulos is known to be one of the better letterers in the business and this book is a good example of why he’s kept that reputation.

The final section of Second Contact includes a three-page text piece by editor Timothy Tuohy describing how this book came to be (“Making a Crossover”). It’s interesting for the candor in how the book came together, especially in regard to how it was difficult to find a writer, or two.

In addition, just like with the Original Series crossover, we get a few art pin-ups as well. The first of three is an unused ad piece by Nord, Koblish, and colorist Mel Sanchez. This is a very rough piece featuring Worf and Wolverine.

The next image is also by Nord and Koblish with colors by Liquid! This is better than the other, but all but two figures have too much black in their face.

The final pin-up is a great team-up symbol of Wolverine crossing claws with Worf’s ever-present bat’leth – a wonderful image!