Captain's Log: Lower Decks Is Over. Its Comic Isn't. Here's Why That's Not Nothing
IDW just released Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol. 3: Second Second Contact — the licensed comic's third collection since the animated series ended. It's not written by anyone from the show's writers' room, and that's worth being honest about rather than dressing up as something it isn't.
Captain's log, stardate 2026.9.30. Star Trek: Lower Decks, Volume 3: Second Second Contact hit shelves yesterday from IDW Publishing — 144 pages collecting issues #13 through #18, in which an entire planet's population goes missing and Captain Freeman's crew has to recover them while fending off alien invaders, forcing a very overdue redo of first contact with the Laapeerians. Written by Tim Sheridan, drawn by Vernon Smith.
Here's the detail worth being precise about, because it's easy to get backwards: Sheridan isn't a Lower Decks TV writer or producer moonlighting in comics. He's an Eisner, Ringo and GLAAD-nominated writer-producer with a substantial résumé elsewhere — Justice League: Action, the animated Reign of the Supermen and Superman: Man of Tomorrow, Batman: The Long Halloween, DC's Alan Scott: The Green Lantern, Netflix's Transformers: War for Cybertron and Dragon Age: Absolution — who, by his own account, grew up in 1980s Rhode Island reading every Trek novel he could find while everyone else was out dating. IDW brought him onto the Lower Decks comic starting with issue #7, picking up from Ryan North's opening run. He's a lifelong fan with real industry chops, not a member of Mike McMahan's writers' room. Both of those things can be true, and neither is a knock on the book.
Why the distinction matters: most licensed comics based on a cancelled show exist in a fog where nobody quite knows how much creative authority is behind them, and that ambiguity does the book no favors either way. A fan-turned-pro writer who studies the source material and gets the voices right is a perfectly good reason for a tie-in comic to work. Claiming institutional continuity it doesn't have is a worse pitch than the honest one — a devoted reader, writing characters he clearly loves, keeps a cancelled show's world turning over in print. That's the actual story here, and it doesn't need embellishing.
Trek has a genuinely uneven history with what happens after a show ends. The Animated Series spent decades outside canon before fan advocacy got it folded back in. Enterprise closed with narrative threads still open in 2005 and never got the sixth season that would have tied them off. DS9 and Voyager both wrapped cleanly, but that's the exception more than the rule. A licensed comic continuing Lower Decks' cast and setting — Freeman, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, all still bumbling through Starfleet protocol on the Cerritos — is Trek doing what it's done before: letting a format that doesn't need a studio's green light keep a show's world alive after the one that made it stops filming.
It also fits a pattern this column keeps noticing in the franchise's 60th-anniversary year: a solo journaling RPG that turns the captain's log itself into gameplay, a flagship IDW ongoing that lets Seven of Nine's Enterprise-G push past the four quadrants, and now a cancelled animated comedy getting a third collected volume instead of quietly fading out. Different bets, same instinct — Trek's stewardship this year has been willing to let a story keep going in whatever format still wants it, even when the original one closed up shop.
Lower Decks never pulled the audience numbers that would have kept it running forever. But "Second Second Contact" is a reminder that ending on television doesn't have to mean ending, full stop — it just means the story moves to a shelf that doesn't need a network's permission to keep stocking it.
Live long and prosper, Cerritos. Somebody's still writing you.
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