Peanut butter and chocolate in the 23rd century

It's a quintessential James T. Kirk moment. The Starship Enterprise captain and his away team are trapped in an alternate dimension, one where a militaristic Earth controls much of the galaxy in an oppressive police state. The Star Trek crew have run into another batch of folks trapped in the same wrong dimension - this being a handful of the members of the Legion of Super Heroes. Things look bleak for all our heroes. And Kirk starts layin' the charm on Shadow Lass. You can almost hear the smarm coming off the printed page as Kirk tells her "You know, I don't know if I've ever met a woman with skin quite that shade of blue."

And it's little moments like that that make the Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes crossover (2012, 152 pages, IDW Publishing, $25) a fun little read. Written by sf novelist/comics writer Chris Roberson, the book collects the six-issue 2011/2012 miniseries by IDW, which has a history dabbling with crossovers of its licensed titles such as Dr. Who, Star Trek and Transformers. Both Trek and Legion are manna for nerds. And both, as the story points out, come from similar, idealistic corners of the s.f. universe - Trek the story of an exploratory ship sent in the 23rd century by the altruistic United Federation of Planets to just go around and discover things, Legion the story of the altruistic United Planets' group of superheroes who fly around and battle evil and alien threats in the 30th century. Both are undeniably hokey, yet have shown incredible longevity (Trek, especially, due to a series of movies, television shows, books and video games, though Legion has done OK as a B- or C-list comic series, with a three-season Warner Bros. cartoon giving it some new life in 2006). I've long been a decent fan of both - particularly the Legion comics, such as the Keith Giffen "Five Years Later" run on the series in 1989-90, as well as the work Giffen did with writer Paul Levitz prior and the times Geoff Johns has dabbled in the Legion in recent years. So seeing this crossover filled me with a giddy rush. But while worth reading, especially if a fan of either/both products, I don't think the end product is a must-have. The art, by Jeffrey Moy, who's worked on Legion in the past, is workmanlike and fine, if a bit lacking in panels that cry out of the scope of, say, George Perez's work in "Legion of Three Worlds." The story, meanwhile, is an amusing "something for everyone," from Vandal Savage/Mr. Flint being the chief villain to Q being, literally, the deux ex machina that both creates and ultimately solves the alternate evil universe challenge. The character archetypes are spot on, though everything is done with this slightly jaunty "look at all this fun we're having" tone that makes it a bit cartoony (cartoony, that is, for a comic book that already combines characters from a somewhat campy classic s.f. TV show and a somewhat campy classic comic book series, thus raising issues within the reviewer's own mind about how much can you expect from this kind of product in terms of adult content, while at the same time acknowledging there are ways to make genuinely moving or adult or intelligent superhero comics - just look at Watchmen or Identity Crisis or Powers - and so to dismiss any desire for something meatier than what the reviewer would've loved when he was 15 are ridiculous and thus we end up in this never ending Lincoln/Douglas). It's at least nice to see Uhura elevated to being an active part of the away team and the events, instead of a helpless token. So there's that.