Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ― Fool's Gold

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (IDW) #1

by Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Fabio Mantovani (Artist)

Captain Sisko and the crew of Deep Space Nine make their triumphant return to comics When the station begins to be overrun by thieves, treasure-seekers, bounty-hunters, and other assorted ne'er-do-wells, Major Kira and Constable Odo must find out why. Can they get to the bottom of it before the station's new visitors bring things to a boiling point?

Genres: Star Trek, Comics, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Star Trek Deep Space Nine

104 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[Ill D · Rating 2 out of 5]

With art as mediocre as the story that underlays it, my first venture into the comic series for Deep Space Nine has left me somewhat disappointed.

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This "review" is going to be like 90% pictures from the graphic novel. I have tried to crop out speech bubbles that give away too much about the story and put the images in random order to avoid spoilers… though I assume not that many people are worried about spoilers for this kind of thing

Rating: 3 stars

Fool's Gold, similar to it's sequel, Too Long a Sacrifice, (that I read first... oops) is a mystery-type story taking place aboard the space station Deep Space Nine where Odo must find the clues to solve... the mystery. That is just a round-about way of saying this book is Odo doing constable stuff. Why I made it so complicated, I don't know.

But you're not here for a proper review, are you? If you are, sorry, you're in the wrong place. Check out some of the other people who have written stuff about this book if you want that. Here we just do funny pictures. So here we go!!!

First of all we have a couple of inaccuracies. Not little niggly things, proper details that are incorrect (well, I suppose they are kind of niggly, but I digress). The first is a spelling mistake!! They spelled Jadzia wrong!!!!!! They wrote it “Jadzea”. Observe:

NOOOOOOOOOO. Come on, all you have to do is look at the credits, or the subtitles, or literally anything with her name in it and you would have the correct spelling right in front of you.

The other problem I had was that the Chief's got an ensign pip! No!! He is meant to be petty officer, i.e. no rank. See, look what his Wiki page says: "Senior Chief Petty Officer Miles Edward O'Brien was a 24th century Human Starfleet non-commissioned officer" SO NO RANK. And yet they gave him A RANK in this book:

INCORRECT. I told my dad about all these inaccuracies and he said to me “well you can’t read that. It’s wrong. It’s false”

Also linking into the above image is that Kira looks like the women in super hero comics. Always. Big chest, big hips, all the sexy women things (also in that picture she looks possessed by Pah Wraith).

I've gone on for ages. Now I have little mental power left so I'm going to quick fire with some funny pictures. First couple are Dax, so here's Jadzia looking weird:

Cool. Awesome. The second Dax one, this time she looks like she has some pretty epic lip fillers:
Am I just seeing things? Nah, she definitely looks like she overloaded with the cosmetics.

Now we have two shots that made me laugh. This one of Dax and Sisko is funny:
And this group shot caused me to snort:


Ok, so this one is kind of cheating a bit because I did zoom in a bit, so you probably would not see it in a physical copy, but here's a weird Bashir:


The Odo Illustrations Segment
The shining light of this graphic novel is the myriad of Odo depictions. The illustrator just could not decide how he wanted to portray Odo, and fair enough to be honest. I'm saying this from no drawing experience, but I bet Odo is a difficult character to draw. How do you even begin to tackle his face, for a start. One time I was watching Deep Space Nine and my brother came in, saw Odo, and said something akin to “that guy looks like it face has been sanded down too much with sandpaper” and I think that's a fair description. How do you draw a sanded-down person?

Well, let's start off positive, showing that it can be done:

In my opinion, that's a good Odo. So, they've shown that they can do it. But you came for botched illustrations. Well, do I have some Odos for you. But I'll start off slow. If the above image is an ideal depiction of Odo, this one (to me) is slightly off:

Not the worst, but it is still not my Odo.

From now we get into the ultra strange territory. There were too many hilarious ones to put them all here, but I have picked three of the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) to show you. We have this one, which I cannot even begin to introduce so I'm just going to throw it up:

How...? Why...? HUH?! What was the design process going into this image?!

Now we have what I like to call the Two Teeth Picture. "What?" you say. "Odo has more than two teeth!" Well, this picture begs to differ:

Tell me he doesn't look like a baby crying out for his teething ring.

And lastly we have this one. Thankfully he has a full set of teeth (never thought that would be a measure of quality) but there is just so much wrong with this image. I can't put my finger on what exactly is wrong, but my brain doesn't like it one bit. When I saw this for the first time, I snorted so hard I dropped my phone I was reading the ebook off of. Ok, enough rambling. You've probably skimmed down the page so you already knew what was coming, but here it is:

In all it's glory. This will never not be funny.


That’s the end of the Odo ones. Now I will show you just one more picture (almost done, I promise), we have my favourite - these guys:

Both of their expressions! I love it! It makes laugh out loud! This background guy, he has the best face. I love this!!!!!!!

Ok that's it. I hope you enjoyed all the funny pictures... or if no one got down here, hi future me.

[David Rhodes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing happens.... It's like the author had decided on a story and then decided to stop it before the end of the first chapter.

[Mayaj · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting KIRA'S BOOBS story about KIRA'S BUTT something that was 100% Not Quark's Fault.

[Mareike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good little romp that couldce easily have been an episode - the solution was a little prrdictable, but that's fine.

The art was okay, though not the best I've seen in Trek comics. (The way the artist drew Kira was especially weird at times.)

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. It takes place "Pre-Worf". It was neat to re-visit Deep Space Nine. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the show. It's a quick read, that catches the feel of the show.
The art is well done too. (Major Kira never looked so good. :) ) Star Trek fans will enjoy this.

[Benjamin Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love DS9

This book brought justice to Star trek. Definitely recommend, the Art was very vibrant. The Storyline was fun ! Enjoy

[Mikael Kuoppala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set between seasons three and four of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Fool’s Gold” is a nicely realized little missing episode of the legendary series. Scott Tipton taps into the quirky and in a way homey feel the series had during the first few years of its run and delivers a nice mystery with not that much political intrigue but lots of great character content and solid themes.

DS9 was originally conceived as a small town from an old western brought to space, and “Fool’s Gold” reflects that premise perfectly. And as much as I love the realpolitik and realism of the last few seasons- the best in trek in my opinion- it’s still nice to revisit the more innocent times before the series’ midpoint.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Deep Space Nine. Even though this is an unpopular opinion, it is probably my favorite Star Trek series. "Deep Space Nine - Fool's Gold" is an original comic that reads like an episode of the show, and Tipton does a great job of being faithful to the tensions between the characters that exist throughout the show, particularly Odo and Quark. I really visualized the story being played out as a screenplay, and though it is not perfect, with some misspellings and some really badly drawn renderings of O'Brien, it is well worth the read. I must also say that the way that Kira is drawn really makes me take another look at her while watching the show. Just a simple drawn line really can make all of the difference. A good, safe addition to the Deep Space Nine world.

[Victor Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an interesting adventure, considering that we don't have no new Deep Space Nine stories for a long, long time now. I'd like to see something more epic, like the Dominion, Cardassian, Klingon or Romulan plots than this one about scoundrels coming from all over the place to DS9. I did like the artwork, but some facial expressions are too exaggerated sometimes. I did never see Sisko with a bloodlust face... but it was nice, to read a new DS9 adventure...

[Helga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though the plot was quite predictable, I really liked the writing and low stakes drama. Especially Garak was coming through.

Unfortunately, the art. Mantovani clearly knows how uniforms work, as seen on Jadzia. Yet he insists on the worst Seven cosplay for Kira. It’s from 2009 but I expect more from DS9 media.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't like the artwork, because the characters often don't look anything like they do in real life. Just when the story starts to get interesting (a treasure hunt), it quickly ends with the DS9 crew creating a hoax so everyone forgets about the treasure, and we get an anticlimactic ending.

[SamB · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story here is serviceable enough, if unremarkable. But the artwork is quite medicore, with a stylised style that meant there were a number of occasions (mainly action scenes) where I could barely tell what was happening, and Major Kira is drawn as a teenage boy's fantasy.

[Matteo Fulgheri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad story, very bad art...

[Apostolos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone shares a story that some Cardassian bureaucrat had been siphoning off funds from the Cardassian occupation of Bajor for his own benefit (plausible!). He left clues on Terok Nor as to where those looted Bajoran treasures are hidden on Bajor. Hence, every self-proclaimed treasure hunter comes to DS9 to try to find the treasure location, and in the process causing chaos and havoc. Only...there is no treasure. It is all an elaborate hoax to destabilize DS9 (or perhaps line Quark's pockets...we'll never know). What happens next? You'll have to read this comic yourself!

This was an enjoyable story. My first foray into a DS9-specific story, and I think it was rather plausible as a DS9 episode.

[Rocky Sunico · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not exactly a story with far-reaching implications for the Star Trek universe at large, Fool's Good is a distinctly DS9 adventure that feels quite at home among other episodes of the show. It hits a lot of familiar bears ranging from O'Brien dealing with more systems issues on the station to Odo suspecting Quark is somehow involved in the drastic increase of visitors to the station. The whole thing feels like an old shirt - familiar and comforting. It's a lot of good fun and the art nicely captures the crew of this far-flung space station.

[Victor Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an interesting adventure, considering that we don't have no new Deep Space Nine stories for a long, long time now. I'd like to see something more epic, like the Dominion, Cardassian, Klingon or Romulan plots than this one about scoundrels coming from all over the place to DS9. I did like the artwork, but some facial expressions are too exaggerated sometimes. I did never see Sisko with a bloodlust face... but it was nice, to read a new DS9 adventure...

[Adam Collings · Rating 3 out of 5]

While set in between seasons 3 and 4, felt a bit like a season 1 episode, when the show was still trying to find its identity apart from TNG. But, a fun enough little story with some beloved characters.

[Yvette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good Story

It was fun and I could hear all the characters’ voices in the writing. The story moved all quickly. Good job.

[Debra Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

The station is packed with people looking for treasure.

[Benji Tomlinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

The art was awful and the story not any better.

The art was awful and the story not any better. Recommend not wasting your time. Doesn't add Anything to DS9 lore.

[Natira]

Das war nichts für mich, weder Story noch Zeichnungen.

[Andre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended. One of the best in the series.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

The kind of light-hearted stories that were more common the first few seasons of the show.

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 . mostly okay, the setting felt wrong (should have been earlier in the series) the artwork went to latex uniforms at one point.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty much like reading an episode of the series. Suddenly, the station is flooding with "tourists" and scoundrels, and Commander Sisko needs to find out why. Turns out there is a lost treasure, and many think the station has something to do with it. It's a mystery as Sisko needs to figure out how to deal with the problems the thieves and treasure hunters bring to the station. I will just say there may be a very unique solution at hand. I personally did enjoy the ending. The only thing I really wish is that some of the art was a bit better. The story was good, but the art quality seemed just average at times. Still, an entertaining read.

[Carol Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the story. The art was okay not great but at least you could tell who was who. This is set during the run of the show and it deals with a rumor of hidden riches somewhere on DS9. I really liked how Kira and Odo worked together to help figure out what was going on. Gul Dukat was his normal insufferable self. I always thought he was a great villain. We have some good scenes with Bashir and Garak. All in all a nice edition the Trek universe.

[Steven Shinder · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the artwork for this story and some of the character interactions, but there isn't really much to this treasure hunt story. It's just a little thing that happens between seasons 3 and 4 of the show.

[Morbus Iff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Treasure hunt aboard the space station. Eh.

[John Yelverton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun little tale from the world of "Deep Space Nine" that will make you want to pop a DVD and watch the episodes again.